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Title: Ruth of the U. S. A.

Author: Edwin Balmer

Illustrator: Harold Harrington Betts

Release date: June 12, 2022 [eBook #68296]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: A. C. McClurg & Co

Credits: Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUTH OF THE U. S. A. ***





Ruth of the U. S. A.




[Illustration: Ruth crouched beside Gerry, and shot through the
wreckage at the circling German plane]




Ruth of the U. S. A.

By Edwin Balmer

Illustrated by Harold H. Betts

CHICAGO

A. C. McCLURG & CO.

1919




Copyright 1919, A. C. McClurg & Co.

Copyright 1918, The Tribune Company

Published March, 1919

Copyrighted in Great Britain

W. F. HALL PRINTING COMPANY, CHICAGO




TO THE MEMORY OF

MY FATHER

AN ENGLISHMAN AND AN AMERICAN




CONTENTS

     I A Beggar and a Passport
    II The Wand of War
   III The New Rôle
    IV At Mrs. Corliss’
     V “You’re Not Like Anyone Else”
    VI “We’re Fighting”
   VII “One of Our Own!”
  VIII France
    IX To Picardy
     X The Great Attack
    XI The Resistance
   XII “How Could This Happen?”
  XIII Byrne Arrives
   XIV Full Confession
    XV Gerry’s Problem
   XVI Into Germany
  XVII The Road to Lauengratz
 XVIII The Message in Cipher
   XIX The Underground Railway
    XX An Officers’ Prison
   XXI The Raid on the Schloss
  XXII “The War’s Over”




ILLUSTRATIONS

Ruth crouched beside Gerry, and shot through the wreckage at the
circling German plane

She looked away, half expecting the sound of the music, and the
roses, and palms, and Gerry Hull would vanish

Gerry was there at the door of her cell; another man was with
him; a friend




Transcriber’s Notes:

  1. As printed, this book omitted words in sentences in about eight
  places. This edition of the book retains those sentences as printed
  to accurately represent the original publication.

  2. Otherwise, misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected.
  Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

  3. Italics in the original are shown bracketed by undersocres in
  this publication, _like this_.




RUTH OF THE U. S. A.


CHAPTER I: A BEGGAR AND A PASSPORT


It was the day for great destinies. Germany was starving; yet German
armies, stronger and better prepared than ever before, were about to
annihilate the British and the French. Austria, crumbling, was
secretly suing for peace; yet Austria was awaiting only the melting
of snow in the mountain passes before striking for Venice and Padua.
Russia was reorganizing to fight again on the side of the allies;
Russia, prostrate, had become a mere reservoir of manpower for the
Hohenzollerns. The U-boats were beaten; the U-boats were sweeping
the seas. America had half a million men in France; America had only
“symbolical battalions” parading in Paris.

A thousand lies balanced a thousand denials; the pointer of
credulity swung toward the lies again; and so it swung and swung
with everything uncertain but the one fact which seemed, on this
day, perfectly plain--American effort had collapsed. America not
only had failed to aid her allies during the nine months since she
had entered the war; she seemed to have ceased even to care for
herself. Complete proof of this was that for five days now
industries had been shut down, offices were empty, furnaces cold.

Upon that particular Tuesday morning, the fifth day of this halt, a
girl named Ruth Alden awoke in an underheated room at an Ontario
Street boarding house--awoke, merely one of the millions of the
inconsiderable in Chicago as yet forbidden any extraordinary
transaction either to her credit or to her debit in the mighty
accounts of the world war. If it be true that tremendous fates
approaching cast their shadows before, she was unconscious of such
shadows as she arose that morning. To be sure, she reminded herself
when she was dressing that this was the day that Gerry Hull was
arriving home from France; and she thought about him a good deal;
but this was only as thousands of other romance-starved girls of
twenty-two or thereabouts, who also were getting up by gaslight in
underheated rooms at that January dawn, were thinking about Gerry
Hull. That was, Ruth would like, if she could, to welcome him home
to his own people and to thank him that day, in the name of his city
and of his country, for what he had done. But this was to her then
merely a wild, unrealizable fantasy.

What was actual and immediately before her was that Mr. Sam
Hilton--the younger of the Hilton brothers, for whom she was office
manager--had a real estate deal on at his office. He was to be there
at eight o’clock, whether the office was heated or not, and she also
was to be there to draw deeds and releases and so on; for someone
named Cady who was over draft age, but had himself accepted by an
engineer regiment, was sacrificing a fine factory property for a
quick sale and Sam Hilton, who was in class one but still hoped
somehow to avoid being called, was snapping up the bargain.

So Ruth hurried downtown much as usual upon that cold morning; and
she felt only a little more conscious contempt for Sam Hilton--and
for herself--as she sat beside him from eight until after nine, with
her great coat on and with her hands pulled up in her sleeves to
keep them warm while he schemed and reschemed to make a certain
feature of his deal with the patriotic Cady more favorable to
himself. He had tossed the morning paper upon his desk in front of
him with the columns folded up which displayed Gerry Hull’s picture
in his uniform and which told about Gerry Hull’s arriving that
morning and about his service in France. Thus Ruth knew that Sam
Hilton had been reading about Lieutenant Hull also; and, indeed,
Hilton referred to him when he had made the last correction upon the
contract and was in good humor and ready to put business aside for a
few minutes and be personal.

“Gerry Hull’s come home today from France, I see. Some fighter, that
boy!” he exclaimed with admiration. “Ain’t he?”

Ruth gazed at Hilton with wonder. She could have understood a man
like Sam Hilton if he refused to read at all about Gerry Hull; or
she could have understood if, reading, Sam Hilton denied admiration.
But how could a young man know about Lieutenant Hull and admire him
and feel no personal reproach at himself staying safe and satisfied
and out of “it”?

“Some flier!” he was going on with his enthusiastic praise. “How
many Huns has he got--fourteen?”

Ruth knew the exact number; but she did not tell him. “Lieutenant
Hull is here under orders and upon special duty,” she said. “They
sent him home or he wouldn’t be away from the front now.” The blood
warmed in her face as she delivered this rebuke gently to Sam
Hilton. He stared at her and the color deepened, staining her clear,
delicate temples and forehead. “They had to send him here to stir us
up.”

“What’s the matter with us?” Sam Hilton questioned with honest lack
of concern. Her way of mentioning Gerry Hull had not hit him at all;
and he was not seeking any answer to his question. He was watching
Ruth flush and thinking that she was mighty pretty with as much
color as she had now. He liked her in that coat, too; for the collar
of dark fur, though not of good quality, made her youthful face even
more “high class” looking than usual. Sam Hilton spent a great deal
of money on his own clothes without ever achieving the coveted
“class” in his appearance; while this girl, who worked for him and
who had only one outfit that he ever saw, always looked right. She
came of good people, he knew--little town people and not rich, since
she had to work and send money home; but they were “refined.”

Ruth’s bearing and general appearance had pretty well assured Sam of
this--the graceful way she stood straight and held up her head, the
oval contour of her face as well as the pretty, proud little nose
and chin, sweet and yet self-reliant like her eyes which were blue
and direct and thoughtful looking below brown brows. Her hair was
lighter than her brows and she had a great deal of it; a little wavy
and a marvelous amber in color and in quality. It seemed to take in
the sunlight like amber when she moved past the window and to let
the light become a part of it. Her hands which she thrust from her
sleeves now and clasped in front of her, were small and well shaped,
though strong and capable too. She had altogether so many “refined”
characteristics that it was only to make absolutely certain about
her and her family that Sam had paid someone ten dollars to verify
the information about herself which she had supplied when he had
employed her. This information, fully verified, was that her father,
who was dead, had been an attorney at Onarga, Illinois, where her
mother was living with three younger sisters, the oldest fourteen.
Mrs. Alden took sewing; and since Ruth sent home fifteen dollars a
week out of her twenty-five, the family got along. This fifteen
dollars a week, totaling seven hundred and eighty a year which the
family would continue to need and would expect from Ruth or from
whomever married her, bothered Sam Hilton. But he thought this
morning that she was worth wasting that much for as he watched her
small hands clasping, watched the light upon her hair and the flush
sort of fluttering--now fading, now deepening--on her smooth cheek.
Having banished business from his mind, he was thinking about her so
intently that it did not occur to him that she could be thinking of
anyone else. Sam Hilton could not easily imagine anyone flushing
thus merely because she was dreaming of a boy whom she had never met
and could never meet and who certainly wouldn’t know or care
anything about her.

“He was hurt a couple of weeks ago,” she said, “or probably he
wouldn’t have left at all.”

That jolted Sam Hilton. It did not bring him any rebuke; it simply
made him angry that this girl had been dreaming all that time about
Gerry Hull instead of about himself.

“Was the Lady Agnes hurt too?” he asked.

“Hurt? No.”

“Well, she’s come with him.” Sam leaned forward and referred to the
folded newspaper. “‘Lady Agnes Ertyle, the daughter of the late Earl
of Durran who was killed at Ypres in 1915, whose two brothers fell,
one at Jutland on the _Invincible_ and the other at Cambrai,’” he
read aloud, “‘is also in the party.’” He skipped down the column
condensing the following paragraphs: “She’s to stay at his mamma’s
house on Astor Street while in Chicago. She’s twenty-one; her
picture was printed yesterday. Did you see it?”

This was a direct question; and Ruth had to answer, “Yes.”

“He’s satisfied with her, I should say; but maybe he’s come home to
look further,” Sam said with his heaviest sarcasm. He straightened,
satisfied that he had brought Ruth back to earth. “Now I’m going
over to see Cady; he’ll sign this as it is, I think.” Sam put the
draft of the contract in his pocket. “He leaves town this noon, so
he has to. I’ll be all clear by twelve. You’re clear for the day
now. Have lunch with me, Miss Alden?”

Ruth refused him quietly. He often asked her for lunch and she
always refused; so he was used to it.

“All right. You’re free for the day,” he repeated generously and,
without more ceremony, he hurried off to Cady.

Ruth waited until he had time to leave the building before she
closed the office and went down the stairs. She stepped out to the
street, only one girl among thousands that morning dismissed from
bleak offices--one of thousands to whom it seemed ignominious that
day, when all the war was going so badly and when Gerry Hull was
arriving from France, to go right back to one’s room and do nothing
more for the war than to knit until it was time to go to bed and
sleep to arise next morning to come down to make out more deeds and
contracts for men like Sam Hilton.

Had it been a month or two earlier, Ruth again would have made the
rounds of the headquarters where girls gave themselves for real war
work; but now she knew that further effort would be fruitless.
Everyone in Chicago, who possessed authority to select girls for
work in France, knew her registration card by heart--her name, her
age, the fact that she had a high-school education. They were
familiar with the occupations in which she claimed
experience--office assistant; cooking; care of children (had she not
taken care of her sisters?); first aid; can drive motor car; operate
typewriter. Everyone knew that her health was excellent; her sight
and hearing perfect. She would go “anywhere”; she would start “at
any time.” But everyone also knew that answer which truth had
obliged her to write to the challenge, “What persons dependent upon
you, if any?” So everyone knew that though Ruth Alden would give
herself to any work, someone had to find, above her expenses, seven
hundred and eighty dollars a year for her family.

Accordingly she could think of nothing better to do this morning
than to join the throng of those who were going to Michigan Avenue
and to the building where the British and French party, with which
Gerry Hull was traveling, would be welcomed to the city. Ruth had no
idea of being admitted to the building; she merely stood in the
crowd upon the walk; but close to where she stood, a limousine
halted. A window of the car was down; and suddenly Ruth saw Gerry
Hull right before her. She knew him at once from his picture; he was
tall and active looking, even though sitting quiet in the car; he
was bending forward a bit and the sudden, slight motions of his
straight, lithe shoulders and the quick turn of his head as he gazed
out, told of the vigor and impetuousness which--Ruth knew--were his.

He had a clear, dark skin; his hair and brows were dark; his eyes,
blue and observant and interested. He had the firm, determined chin
of a fighter; his mouth was pleasant and likable. He was younger
looking than his pictures had made him appear; not younger than his
age, which Ruth knew was twenty-four. Indeed, he looked older than
four and twenty; yet one could not say that he looked two years
older or five or ten; the maturity which war had brought Gerry Hull
was not the sort which one could reckon in years. It made one--at
least it made Ruth--pulse all at once with amazing feeling for him,
with a strange mixture of anger that such a boy must have
experienced that which had so seared his soul, and of pride in him
that he had sought the experience. He was a little excited now at
being home again, Ruth thought, in this city where his grandfather
had made his fortune, where his father had died and where he,
himself, had spent his boyhood; he turned to point out something to
the girl who was seated beside him; so Ruth gazed at her and
recognized her, too. She was Lady Agnes Ertyle, young and slight and
very lovely with her brown hair and gray eyes and fair, English
complexion and straight, pure features. She had something too of
that maturity, not of years, which Gerry Hull had; she was a little
tired and not excited as was he. But for all that, she was beautiful
and very young and not at all a strange creation in spite of her
title and in spite of all that her family--her father and her
brothers and she herself--had done in Belgium and in France. Indeed,
she was only a girl of twenty-two or three. So Ruth quite forgot
herself in the feeling of rebuke which this view of Gerry Hull and
Lady Agnes brought to her. They were not much older or intrinsically
different from herself and they had already done so much; and
she--nothing!

She was so close to them that they had to observe her; and the
English girl nodded to her friendlily and a little surprised. Gerry
Hull seemed not surprised; but he did not nod; he just gazed back at
her.

“What ought I be doing?” Ruth heard her voice appealing to them.

Lady Agnes Ertyle attempted no reply to this extraordinary query;
but Gerry Hull’s eyes were studying her and he seemed, in some way,
to understand her perplexity and dismay.

“Anyone can trust you to find out!” he replied to her aloud, yet as
if in comment to himself rather than in answer to her. The car moved
and left Ruth with that--with Gerry Hull’s assurance to himself that
she could be trusted to discover what she should do. She did not
completely understand what he meant; for she did not know what he
had been thinking when she suddenly thought out aloud before him and
surprised him into doing the same. Nevertheless this brief encounter
stirred and stimulated her; she could not meekly return to her room
after this; so, when the crowd broke up, she went over to State
Street.

The wide, wind-swept way, busy and bleak below the towering sheer of
the great department stores, the hotels and office buildings on
either hand seemed to Ruth never so sordid and self-concerned as
upon this morning. Here and there a flag flapped from a rope
stretched across the street or from a pole pointing obliquely to the
sky; but these merely acknowledged formal recognition of a state of
war; they were not symbols of any evident performance of act of
defense. The people who passed either entirely ignored these flags
or noticed them dully, without the slightest show of feeling. Many
of these people, as Ruth knew, must have sons or brothers in the
training camps; a few might possess sons in the regiments already
across the water; but if Ruth observed any of these, she was unable
to distinguish them this morning from the throng of the indifferent
going about their private and petty preoccupations with complete
engrossment. Likewise was she powerless to discriminate those--not
few in number--who mingled freely in the groups passing under the
flags but who gazed up, not with true indifference, but with hotly
hostile reactions.

The great majority even of the so-called Germans in Chicago were
loyal to America, Ruth knew; but from the many hundred thousand who,
before the American declaration of war, had sympathized with and
supported the cause of the Fatherland, there were thousands now who
had become only more fervent and reckless in their allegiance to
Germany since the United States had joined its enemies--thousands
who put the advantage of the Fatherland above every individual
consideration and who, unable to espouse their cause now openly,
took to clandestine schemes of ugly and treacherous conception.
Thought of them came to Ruth as she passed two men speaking in low
tones to each other, speaking in English but with marked Teutonic
accent; they stared at her sharply and with a different scrutiny
from that which men ordinarily gave when estimating Ruth’s face and
figure. One of them seemed about to speak to her; but, glancing at
the other people on the walk, he instantly reconsidered and passed
by with his companion. Ruth flushed and hurried on down the street
until suddenly she realized that one of the men who had stared at
her, had passed her and was walking ahead of her, glancing back.

She halted, then, a little excited and undecided what was best to
do. The man went on, evidently not venturing the boldness of
stopping, too; and while Ruth remained undecided, a street beggar
seized the opportunity of offering her his wares.

This man was a cripple who, in spite of the severe cold of the
morning, was seated on the walk with his crutches before him; he
pretended to be a pencil vendor and displayed in his mittened hand
an open box half full of pencils; and he had a pile of unopened
boxes at his side. He had taken station at that particular spot on
State Street where most people must pass on their way to and from
the chief department stores; but his trade evidently had been so
slack this morning that he felt need of more aggressive mendicancy.
He scrambled a few yards up the walk to where Ruth had halted and,
gazing up at her, he jerked the edge of her coat.

“Buy a pencil, lady?”

Ruth looked down at the man, who was very cold and ill-dressed and
pitiful; she took a dime from her purse and proffered it to him. He
gazed up at her gratefully and with keen, questioning eyes; and,
instead of taking a pencil from his open box, he picked up one of
the unopened boxes which he had carried with him.

“Take a box, lady,” he pleaded, squirming with a painful effort
which struck a pang of pity through Ruth; it made her think, not
alone of his crippled agony, but the pain of the thousands--of the
millions from the battle fields.

Ruth returned her dime to her purse and took out a dollar bill; the
beggar thrust the mittened fingers of his left hand between his
teeth, jerked off the ragged mitten and grabbed the dollar bill.

“That pays for two boxes,” he said, gazing again up at Ruth keenly.

“I’ll take two,” Ruth said, accepting the sale which the man had
forced rather than deciding it herself.

He selected two boxes from the pile at his side and, glancing at her
face sharply once more, he handed her the boxes and thanked her. She
thrust the boxes into her muff and hurried on.

When she realized the strangeness of this transaction a few moments
later, it seemed to have been wholly due to the beggar’s having
taken advantage of her excitement after meeting Gerry Hull and her
uneasiness at being followed by the German. She had no use for two
boxes of cheap pencils and she could not afford to give a dollar to
a street cripple who probably was an impostor. She felt that she had
acted quite crazily; now she had to take a North State Street car to
return to her room.

She had been saving, out of her money which she kept for herself, a
ridiculous little fund to enable her perhaps to take advantage of a
chance to “do” something some day; now because Lieutenant Hull had
spoken kindly to her, she had flung away a dollar. She tried to keep
her thought from her foolishness; and she succeeded in this readily
by reviewing all the slight incident of her meeting with Gerry Hull.
She had known something about him ever since she was a little girl,
and pictures of him--a little boy with his grandfather--and articles
about his grandfather and about him, too, appeared in the Chicago
newspaper which her father read. Ruth could recall her father
telling her about the great Andrew Hull, how he had come to Chicago
as a poor boy and had made himself one of the greatest men in the
industrial life of the nation; how he owned land and city buildings
and great factories and railroads; and the reason that the
newspapers so often printed the picture of the little boy was
because some day he would own them all.

And Ruth knew that this had come true; and that the little boy,
whose bold, likeable face had looked out upon her from the pictures;
the tall, handsome, athletic and reckless youth who had gone to
school in the East and, later, in England had become the possessor
of great power and wealth in Chicago but instead of being at all
spoiled by it, he was a clean, brave young man--a soldier having
offered himself and having fought in the most perilous of all
services and having fought well; a soldier who was a little flushed
and excited about being home again among his people and who had
spoken friendlily to her.

Ruth reached her room, only remembering the pencil boxes when she
dropped them from her muff upon her table. The solid sound they
made--not rattling as pencils should--caused her to tear the pasted
paper from about one box. She had bought not even pencils but only
boxes packed with paper. Now she had the cover off and was staring
at the contents. A new fifty dollar bank note was on top. Underneath
that was another; below that, another--others. They made a packet
enclosed in a strip such as banks use and this was denominated
$1,000.00. There were twenty fifty-dollar notes in this packet.

Ruth lifted it out; she rubbed her eyes and lifted out another
packet labeled one thousand dollars made up of ten bills of one
hundred dollars each; on the bottom were five one hundred dollar
notes, not fastened together. The box held nothing else.

Her pulses pounded and beat in her head; her hands touching the
money went hot, went cold. This money was real; but her obtaining it
must be a mistake. The box must have been the beggar’s bank which he
had kept beside him; therefore his money had no meaning for her. But
now the cripple’s insistence upon halting her, his keen observation
of her, his slowness at last to make the sale, stirred swift
instincts of doubt. She seized and tore open the other box which she
had bought.

No pencils in it; nor money. It held printed or engraved papers,
folded and refolded tightly. One huge paper was on top, displaying
bright red stamps and a ribbon and seals. This was an official
government document; a passport to France! The picture of the holder
was pasted upon a corner, stamped with the seal of the United
States; and it was her picture! In strange clothes; but herself!

For the instant, as things swam before her in her excitement, there
came to Ruth the Cinderella wonder which a girl, who has been really
a little child once, can never quite cease to believe--the wonder of
a wish by magic made true. The pencils in the beggar’s boxes had
been changed by her purchase of them to money for her and a passport
to France. And for this magic, Gerry Hull was in some way
responsible. She had appealed to him; he had spoken to her and
thenceforth all things she touched turned to fairy gold--or better
than gold; American bank notes and a passport to France!

Then the moment of Ruth, the little girl and the dreamer, was gone;
and Ruth, the business woman competent to earn twenty-five dollars a
week, examined what she held in her hand. As she made out the papers
more clearly, her heart only beat faster and harder; her hands went
moist and trembled and her breath was pent in by presence of the
great challenge which had come to her, which was not fairy at all
but very real and mortal and which put at stake her life and honor
but which offered her something to “do” beyond even her dreams. For
the picture upon the passport was not of her but only of a girl very
much like her; the name, as inscribed in the body of the passport
and as written in hand across the picture and under the seal of the
United States, was not her own but of someone named Cynthia Gail;
and along with the passport was an unattached paper covered with
small, distinct handwriting of a man relating who Cynthia Gail was
and what the recipient of this money and this passport was expected
to do. This paper like the passport was complete and untorn. There
was besides a page of correspondence paper, of good quality, written
upon both sides in the large, free handwriting of a girl--the same
hand which had signed the photograph and the passport, “Cynthia
Gail.”

Ruth read these papers and she went to her door and locked it, she
went to her window and peered cautiously out. If anyone had followed
her, he was not now in evidence. The old, dilapidated street was
deserted as usual at this time and on such a day except for a
delivery truck speeding past, a woman or two on the way to the car
line, and a few pallid children venturing out in the cold. Listening
for sounds below, Ruth heard no unusual movements; so she drew far
back from the window with the money and with the passport and with
the explanatory paper and the letter which she laid before her and
examined most carefully again.




CHAPTER II: THE WAND OF WAR


The man who had formed the small, distinct characters covering the
paper of instructions had written in English; but while he was quite
familiar with English script, it was evident that he had written
with the deliberate pains of a person who realizes the need of
differentiating his letters from the formation natural to him. That
formation, clearly, was German script. Like everyone else, Ruth knew
German families; and, like many other American girls who had been in
high schools before the outbreak of the war, she had chosen German
for a modern language course. Indeed, she had learned German well
enough so that when confronted by the question on her War
Registration card, _What foreign languages do you read well?_ she
had written, _German_.

She had no difficulty, therefore, in recognizing from the too broad
tops of the a’s, the too pointed c’s and the loops which twice
crossed the t’s that the writer had been educated first to write
German. He had failed nowhere to carefully and accurately write the
English form of the letters for which the German form was very
different, such as k and r and s; it was only in the characters
where the two scripts were similar that his care had been less.

    You are (he had written) the daughter of Charles Farwell
    Gail, a dry-goods merchant of Decatur, Illinois. Your
    father and mother--ages 48 and 45--are living; you have one
    older brother, Charles, now twenty-six years old who
    quarreled with his father four years ago and went away and
    has not been heard from. The family believe that he
    entered the war in some capacity years ago; if so, he
    probably was killed for he was of reckless disposition.
    You do not write to him, of course; but in your letters
    home you refer to being always on watch for word from
    Charles. You were twenty-four years old on November 17.
    You have no sisters but one younger brother, Frank, 12 on
    the tenth of May, who is a boy scout; inform him of all
    boy-scout matters in your letters. Your other immediate
    family is a sister of your mother now living with your
    parents; she is a widow, Mrs. Howard Grange, maiden name
    Cynthia Gifford. You were named for her; she has a chronic
    ailment--diabetes. You write to her; you always inquire of
    her condition in letters to your parents. Your closest
    girl friend is Cora Tresdale, La Salle, Illinois, who was
    your roommate at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.; you
    were both class of 1915; you write to her occasionally.
    You recently have been much interested in 2nd Lieutenant
    George A. Byrne, from Decatur, now at Camp Grant; he saw
    you in Chicago this past Saturday. Probably you are
    engaged to him; in any case, your status with him will be
    better defined by letter which will arrive for you at the
    Hotel Champlain, this city, Room 347.

    It is essential that you at once go to hotel and continue
    your identity there. Immediately answer by telegram any
    important inquiry for you; immediately answer all letters.
    Buy a typewriter of traveling design and do all
    correspondence on that, saying that you are taking it up
    for convenience. Your signature is on passport; herewith
    also a portion of letter with your writing. So far as
    known, you do not sign nicknames, except to your father to
    whom you are “Thia.” Mail arriving for you, or to arrive
    at hotel, together with possessions in room will inform
    you of your affairs more fully. So far as now known you
    have no intimate friends in Chicago; you are to start
    Thursday evening for Hoboken where you report Saturday
    morning to Mrs. Donald G. Gresham for work in the
    devastated districts in France, where you will observe all
    desired matters, particularly in regard to number,
    dispositions, personnel, equipment and morale of arriving
    American forces; reporting. If and when it proves
    impractical to forward proper reports, you will make
    report in person, via Switzerland; apply for passport to
    Lucerne.

With this, the connected writing abruptly ended; there was no
signature and no notation except at the bottom of the sheet was an
asterisk referring to an asterisk before the first mention of
“mother.” This note supplied, “Mother’s maiden name, Julia
Trowbridge Gifford,” and also the street address in Decatur. Below
that was the significant addenda:

    Cynthia Gail killed in Sunday night wreck; identification
    now extremely improbable; but watch papers for news. No
    suspicion yet at home or hotel; _but you must appear at
    once and answer any inquiry_.

This last command, which was a repetition, was emphatically
underlined. The page of the letter in Cynthia Gail’s handwriting was
addressed to her mother and was largely a list of
clothing--chemises, waists, stockings, and other articles--which she
had bought in Chicago and charged to her father’s account at two
department stores. A paragraph confided to her mother her feeling of
insignificance at the little part she might play in the war, though
it had seemed so big before she started away:

    Yet no one knows what lies before one; even I may be
    given my great moment to grasp!

The letter was unfinished; Cynthia Gail evidently had been carrying
it with her to complete and mail later when she was killed.

Ruth placed it under her pillow with the other paper and the
passport and the money; she unlocked her door and went out, locking
it behind her; descending to the first floor, she obtained the
yesterday’s paper and brought it back to her room. She found readily
the account of a wreck on Sunday evening when a train had crashed
through a street car. It had proved very difficult to identify
certain of the victims; and one had not been identified at all; she
had been described only as a young girl, well dressed, fur toque,
blue coat with dark fur collar.

The magic of this money and the passport had faded quite away; the
chain of vital, mortal occurrences which had brought them to Ruth
Alden was becoming evident.

There had been, first of all, an American girl named Cynthia Gail of
Decatur, Illinois, young like Ruth but without responsibilities,
loyal and ardent to play her part in the war. She had applied for
overseas work; the government therefore had investigated her,
approved her and issued her a passport and permitted her to make all
arrangements for the journey to France and for work there. She had
left her home in Decatur and had come alone, probably, to Chicago,
arriving not later than Saturday. She apparently had been alone in
the city on Sunday evening after Lieutenant George Byrne had
returned to Camp Grant; also it was fairly certain that she had no
intimate friends in Chicago as she had been stopping at a hotel. On
Sunday evening she had been on the car which was struck by the
train.

This much was positive; the next circumstances had more of
conjecture; but Ruth could reason them out.

Someone among those who first went to the wreck found Cynthia Gail
dead and found her passport upon her. This person might have been a
German agent who was observing her; much more probably he was simply
a German sympathizer who was sufficiently intelligent to appreciate
at once the value of his find. At any rate, someone removed the
passport and letter and other possessions which would identify
Cynthia Gail; and that someone either acted promptly for himself and
for Germany or brought his discoveries to others who acted very
energetically. For they must immediately have got in touch with
people in Decatur who supplied them with the information on the page
of instructions; and they also must have made investigation of
Cynthia Gail’s doings in Chicago.

The Germans thereupon found that they possessed not merely a
passport but a most valuable post and an identity to use for their
own purposes. If they could at once substitute one of their own
people for Cynthia Gail--before inquiry for Cynthia Gail would be
made or knowledge of her loss arise--this substitute would be able
to proceed to France without serious suspicion; she would be able to
move about with considerable freedom, probably, in the districts of
France where Americans were holding the lines and could gather and
forward information of all sorts of the greatest value to the
Germans. They simply must find a German girl near enough like
Cynthia Gail and clever and courageous enough to forge her
signature, assume her place in her family, and in general play her
rôle.

It was plain that the Germans who obtained the passport knew of some
German girl upon whom they could depend; but they could not--or did
not dare to attempt to--communicate directly with her. Ruth knew
vaguely that hundreds of Germans, suspected of hostile activities,
silently had disappeared. She knew that the American secret service
constantly was causing the arrest of others and keeping many more
under observation. It was certain, therefore, that communication
between enemy agents in Chicago must have been becoming difficult
and dangerous; moreover, Ruth had read that it was a principle of
the German spy organization to keep its agents ignorant of the
activities of others in the same organization; so it seemed quite
probable that the people who had possession of Cynthia Gail’s
passport knew that there was a German girl in the city who might
play Cynthia’s part but that they could not locate her. Yet they
were obliged to find her, and to do it quickly, so that she could
take up the rôle of Cynthia Gail before inquiries would be made.

What better way of finding a girl in Chicago than posting yourself
as a beggar on State Street between the great stores? It was indeed
almost certain that if the girl they sought was anywhere in the
city, sooner or later she would pass that spot. Obviously the two
Germans who had mixed with the crowd on State Street also had been
searching for their German confederate; they had mistaken Ruth for
her; and one of them had somehow signaled the beggar to accost her.

This had come to Ruth, therefore, not because she was chosen by
fate; it simply had happened to her, instead of to another of the
hundreds of girls who had passed down State Street that morning,
because she chanced to possess a certain sort of hair and eyes,
shape of nose and chin, and way of carrying her head not unique at
all but, in fact, very like two other girls--one who had been loyal
and eager as she, but who now lay dead and another girl who had been
sought by enemy agents for their work, but who had not been found
and who, probably, would not now be found by them.

For, after giving the boxes to Ruth, the German who played the
beggar would not search further; that delivery of the passport and
the orders to her was proof that he believed she was the girl he
sought. She had only to follow the orders given and she would be
accepted by other German agents as one of themselves! She would
pretend to them that she was going as a German spy into France in
order that she could go, an American spy, into Germany! For that was
what her orders read.

“You will report in person via Switzerland!” they said.

What a tremendous thing had been given her to do! What risks to run;
what plans to make; what stratagems to scheme and to outwit! Upon
her--her who an hour ago had been among the most futile and
inconsiderable in all the world of war--now might hang the fate of
the great moment if she did not fail, if she dared to do without
regard to herself to the uttermost! She must do it alone, if she was
to do it at all! She could not tell anyone! For the Germans who had
entrusted this to her might be watching her. If she went to the
American Secret Service, the Germans almost surely would know; and
that would end any chance of their continuing to believe her their
agent. No; if she was to do it, she must do it of herself; and she
was going to do it!

This money, which she recounted, freed her at once from all bonds
here. She speculated, of course, about whose it had been. She was
almost sure it had not been Cynthia Gail’s; for a young girl upon an
honest errand would not have carried so great an amount in cash. No;
Ruth had heard of the lavishness with which the Germans spent money
in America and of the extravagant enterprises they hazarded in the
hope of serving their cause in some way; and she was certain that
this had been German money and that its association with the
passport had not begun until the passport fell into hostile hands.
The money, consequently, was Ruth’s spoil from the enemy; she would
send home two thousand dollars to free her from her obligation to
her family for more than two years while she would keep the
remainder for her personal expenses.

The passport too was recovered from the enemy; yet it had belonged
to that girl, very like Ruth, who lay dead and unrecognized since
this had been taken from her. There came to Ruth, accordingly, one
of those weak, peacetime shocks of horror at the idea of leaving
that girl to be put away in a nameless grave. As if one more
nameless grave, amid the myriads of the war, made a difference!

Ruth gazed into the eyes of the girl of the picture; and that girl’s
words, which had seemed only a commonplace of the letter, spoke
articulate with living hope. “Even I may be given my great moment to
grasp!”

What could she care for a name on her grave?

“You can’t be thinking of so small and silly a thing for me!” the
girl of the picture seemed to say. “When you and I may save perhaps
a thousand, ten thousand, a million men! I left home to serve; you
know my dreams, for you have dreamed them too; and, more than you, I
had opportunity offered to do. And instead, almost before I had
started, I was killed stupidly and, it seemed for nothing. It almost
happened that--instead of serving--I was about to become the means
of betrayal of our armies. But you came to save me from that; you
came to do for me, and for yourself, more than either of us dreamed
to do. Be sure of me, as I would be sure of you in my place! Save
me, with you, for our great moment! Carry me on!”

Ruth put the picture down. “We’ll go on together!” she made her
compact with the soul of Cynthia Gail.

She was glad that, before acting upon her decision, she had no time
to dwell upon the consequences. She must accept her rôle at once or
forever forsake it. Indeed, she might already be too late. She went
to her washbowl and bathed; she redid her hair, more like the girl
in the picture. The dress which she had been wearing was her best
for the street so she put it on again. She put on her hat and coat;
she separated two hundred dollars from the rest of the money and put
it in her purse; the balance, together with the passport and the
page of Cynthia Gail’s letter, she secured in her knitting bag. The
sheet of orders with the information about Cynthia Gail gave her
hesitation. She reread it again carefully; and she was almost
certain that she could remember everything; but, being informed of
so little, she must be certain to have that exact. So she reached
for her leaflet of instructions for knitting helmets, socks, and
sweaters, and she wrote upon the margin, in almost imperceptible
strokes, shorthand curls and dashes, condensing the related facts
about Cynthia Gail. She put this in her bag, destroyed the original
and, taking up her bag, she went out.

Every few moments as she proceeded down the dun and drab street, in
nowise changed from the half hour before, she pressed the bag
against her side to feel the hardness of the packets pinned in the
bottom; she needed this feelable proof to assure her that this last
half hour had not been all her fantasy but that truly the wand of
war, which she had seen to lift so many out of the drudge of mean,
mercenary tasks, had touched her too.

She hailed a taxicab as soon as she was out of sight of the boarding
house and directed it to the best downtown store where she bought,
with part of the two hundred dollars, such a fur toque and such a
blue coat with a fur collar as she supposed Cynthia Gail might have
possessed. She had qualms while she was paying for them; she seemed
to be spending a beggar’s money, given her by mistake. She wore the
new toque and the coat, instructing that her old garments be sent,
without name, to the war-relief shop.

Out upon the street again, the fact that she had spent the money
brought her only exultation; it had begun to commit her by deed, as
well as by determination and had begun to muster her in among those
bound to abandon all advantage--her security, her life--in the great
cause of her country. It had seemed to her, before, the highest and
most wonderful cause for which a people had ever aroused; and now,
as she could begin to think herself serving that cause, what might
happen to her had become the tiniest and meanest consideration.

She took another taxicab for the Hotel Champlain. She knew this for
a handsome and fashionable hotel on the north side near the lake;
she had never been in such a hotel as a guest. Now she must remember
that she had had a room there since last week and she had been away
from it since Sunday night, visiting, and she had kept the room
rather than go to the trouble of giving it up. When she approached
the hotel, she leaned forward in her seat and glanced at herself in
the little glass fixed in one side of the cab. She saw that she was
not trembling outwardly and that she had good color--too much rather
than too little; and she looked well in the new, expensive coat and
toque.

When the cab stopped and the hotel doorman came out, she gave him
money to pay the driver and she went at once into the hotel, passing
many people who were sitting about or standing.

The room-clerk at the desk looked up at her, as a room-clerk gazes
at a good looking and well-dressed girl who is a guest.

“Key, please,” she said quietly. She had to risk her voice without
knowing how Cynthia Gail had spoken. That was one thing which the
Germans had forgotten to ascertain--or had been unable to
discover--for her. But the clerk noticed nothing strange.

“Yes, Miss Gail,” he recognized her, and he turned to take the key
out of box 347. “Mail too, Miss Gail?”

“Please.”

He handed Ruth three letters, two postmarked Decatur and one
Rockford, and also the yellow envelope of a telegram. He turned back
to the box and fumbled for a card.

“There was a gentleman here for you ’bout half an hour ago, Miss
Gail,” the clerk recollected. “He waited a while but I guess he’s
gone. He left this card for you.”

Ruth was holding the letters and also the telegram unopened; she had
not cared to inquire into their contents when in view of others. It
was far safer to wait until she could be alone before investigating
matters which might further confuse her. So she was very glad that
the man who had been “here for her” was not present at that instant;
certainly she required all the advantage which delay and the mail
and the contents of Cynthia Gail’s room could give her.

She had thought, of course, of the possibility of someone awaiting
her; and she had recognized three contingencies in that case. A man
who called for her might be a friend or a relative of Cynthia Gail;
this, though difficult enough, would be easiest and least dangerous
of all. The man might be a United States agent aware that Cynthia
Gail was dead, that her passport had fallen into hostile hands; he
therefore would have come to take her as an enemy spy with a stolen
passport. The man might be a German agent sent there to aid her or
give her further orders or information, if the Germans still were
satisfied that they had put the passport into proper hands; if they
were not--that is, if they had learned that the beggar had made a
mistake--then the man might be a German who had come to lure her
away to recover the passport and punish her.

The man’s card, with his name--Mr. Hubert Lennon, engraved in the
middle--told nothing more about him.

“I will be in my room,” Ruth said to the clerk, when she glanced up
from the card. “If Mr. Lennon returns or anyone else calls,
telephone me.”

She moved toward the elevator as quickly as possible; but the
room-clerk’s eyes already were attracted toward a number of men
entering from the street.

“He’s not gone, Miss Gail! Here he is now!” the clerk called.

Ruth pretended not to hear; but no elevator happened to be waiting
into which she could escape.

“Here’s the gentleman for you!” a bellboy announced to Ruth so that
she had to turn and face then and there the gentleman who had been
waiting for her.




CHAPTER III: THE NEW RÔLE


The man who advanced from the group which had just entered the
hotel, appeared to be about thirty years old; he was tall and
sparely built and stooped very slightly as though in youth he had
outgrown his strength and had never quite caught up. He had a
prominent nose and a chin which, at first glance, seemed forceful;
but that impression altered at once to a feeling that here was a man
of whom something might have been made but had not. He was not at
all dissolute or unpleasant looking; his mouth was sensitive, almost
shy, with only lines of amiability about it; his eyes, which looked
smaller than they really were because of the thick lenses of his
glasses, were gray and good natured and observant. His hair was
black and turning gray--prematurely beyond doubt. It was chiefly the
grayness of his hair, indeed, which made Ruth suppose him as old as
thirty. He wore a dark overcoat and gray suit--good clothes, so good
that one noticed them last--the kind of clothes which Sam Hilton
always thought he was buying and never procured. He pulled off a
heavy glove to offer a big, boyish hand.

“How do you do, Cy--Miss Gail?” he greeted her. He was quite sure of
her but doubtful as to use of her given name.

“Hubert Lennon!” Ruth exclaimed, giving her hand to his grasp--a
nice, pleased, and friendly grasp. She had ventured that, whoever he
was, he had known Cynthia Gail long ago but had not seen her
recently; not for several years, perhaps, when she was so young a
girl that everyone called her Cynthia. Her venture went well.

She was able to learn from him, without his suspecting that she had
not known, that she had an engagement with him for the afternoon;
they were to go somewhere--she could not well inquire where--for
some event of distinct importance for which she was supposed to be
“ready.”

“I’m not ready, I’m sorry to say,” Ruth seized swiftly the chance
for fleeing to refuge in “her” room. “I’ve just come in, you know.
But I’ll dress as quickly as I can.”

“I’ll be right here,” he agreed.

She stepped into a waiting elevator and drew back into the corner;
two men, who talked together, followed her in and the car started
upwards. If the Germans had sent someone to the hotel to observe her
when she appeared to take the place of Cynthia Gail, that person
pretty clearly was not Hubert Lennon, Ruth thought; but she could
not be sure of these two men. They were usual looking, middle-aged
men of the successful type who gazed at her more than casually;
neither of them called a floor until after Ruth asked for the third;
then the other said, “Fourth,” sharply while the man who remained
silent left the elevator after Ruth. She was conscious that he came
behind her while she followed the room numbers along the hallway
until she found the door of 347; he passed her while she was opening
it. She entered and, putting the key on the inside, she locked
herself in, pressing close to the panel to hear whether the man
returned. But she heard only a rapping at a door farther on; the
man’s voice saying, “I, Adele;” then a woman’s and a child’s voices.

“Nerves!” Ruth reproached herself. “You have to begin better than
this.”

She was in a large and well-furnished bedroom; the bed and bureau
and dressing table were set in a sort of alcove, half partitioned
off from the end of the room where was a lounge with a lamp and a
writing desk. These were hotel furniture, of course; the other
articles--the pretty, dainty toilet things upon the dressing table,
the dresses and the suit upon the hangers in the closet, the
nightdress and kimono upon the hooks, the boots on the rack, the
waists, stockings, undergarments, and all the other girl’s things
laid in the drawers--were now, of necessity, Ruth’s. There was a new
steamer trunk upon a low stand beyond the bed; the trunk had been
closed after being unpacked and the key had been left in it. A
small, brown traveling bag--also new--stood on the floor beside it.
Upon the table, beside a couple of books and magazines, was a pile
of department-store packages--evidently Cynthia Gail’s purchases
which she had listed in her letter to her mother. The articles,
having been bought on Saturday, had been delivered on Monday and
therefore had merely been placed in the room.

Ruth could give these no present concern; she could waste no time
upon examination of the clothes in the closet or in the drawers. She
bent at once before the mirror of the dressing table where Cynthia
Gail had stuck in two kodak pictures and two cards at the edge of
the glass. The pictures were both of the same young man--a tall,
straight, and strongly built boy in officer’s uniform; probably
Lieutenant Byrne, Ruth thought; at least he was not Hubert Lennon;
and the cards in the glass betrayed nothing about him, either; both,
plainly, were “reminder” cards, one having “Sunday, 4:30!” written
triumphantly across it, the other, “Mrs. Malcolm Corliss, Superior
9979.”

Ruth knew--who in Chicago did not know?--of Mrs. Malcolm Corliss,
particularly since America entered the war. Ruth knew that the
Superior number was a telephone probably in Mrs. Corliss’ big home
on the Lake Shore Drive. Ruth picked up the leather portfolio lying
upon the dressing table; opening it, she faced four portrait
photographs; an alert, able and kindly looking man of about fifty; a
woman a few years younger, not very unlike Ruth’s own mother and
with similarly sweet eyes and a similar abundance of beautiful hair.
These photographs had been but recently taken. The third was several
years old and was of a handsome, vigorous, defiant looking boy of
twenty-one or two; the fourth was of a cunning, bold little youth of
twelve in boy-scout uniform. Ruth had no doubt that these were
Cynthia Gail’s family; she was very glad to have that sight of them;
yet they told her nothing of use in the immediate emergency. Her
hand fell to the drawer of the dresser where, a moment ago, Ruth had
seen a pile of letters; she recognized that she must examine
everything; yet it was easier for her to open first the letters
which had never become quite Cynthia Gail’s--the three letters and
the dispatch which the clerk had given Ruth.

She opened the telegram first and found it was from her father. She
was thinking of herself, not as Ruth Alden, but as actually being
Cynthia Gail now. It was a great advantage to be able to fancy and
to dream; she _was_ Cynthia Gail; she _must_ be Cynthia henceforth
or she could not continue what she was doing even here alone by
herself; and surely she could not keep up before others unless, in
every relation, she thought of herself as that other girl.

    Letter received; it’s like you, but by all means go ahead;
    I’ll back you. Love.
                                                       Father.

That told nothing except that she had, in some recent letter,
suggested an evidently adventurous deviation from her first plan.

The first letter from Decatur which Cynthia Gail now opened was from
her mother--a sweet, concerned motherly letter of the sort which
that girl, who had been Ruth Alden, well knew and which made her cry
a little. It told absolutely nothing about anyone whom Cynthia might
meet in Chicago except the one line, “I’m very glad that Mrs.
Malcolm Corliss has telephoned to you.” The second letter from
Decatur, written a day earlier than the other, was from her father;
from this Cynthia gained chiefly the information--which the Germans
had not supplied her--that her father had accompanied her to
Chicago, established her at the hotel and then been called back home
by business. He had been “sorry to leave her alone” but of course
she was meeting small risks compared to those she was to run. The
letter from Rockford, which had arrived only that morning, was from
George--that meant George Byrne. She had been engaged to him, it
appeared; but they had quarreled on Sunday; he felt wholly to blame
for it now; he was very, very sorry; he loved her and could not give
her up. Would she not write him, please, as soon as she could bring
herself to?

The letter was all about themselves--just of her and of him. No one
else at all was mentioned. The letters in the drawer--eight in
number--were all from him; they mentioned, incidentally, many people
but all apparently of Decatur; there was no reference of any sort to
anyone named Hubert or Lennon.

She returned the letters to their place in the drawer and laid with
them those newly received. The mail, if it gave her small help, at
least had failed to present any immediately difficult problem of its
own. There was apparently no anxiety at home about her; she safely
could delay responding until later in the afternoon; but she could
not much longer delay rejoining Hubert Lennon or sending him some
excuse; and offering excuse, when knowing nothing about the
engagement to which she was committed, was perhaps more dangerous
than boldly appearing where she was expected. The Germans had told
her that they believed she had no close friends in Chicago; and, so
far as she had added to that original information, it seemed
confirmed.

The telephone bell rang and gave her a jump; it was not the
suddenness of the sound, but the sign that even there when she was
alone a call might make demand which she could not satisfy. She
calmed herself with an effort before lifting the receiver and
replying.

“Cynthia?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“It’s a large afternoon affair, dear,” the voice said easily. “But
quite wartime. I’d wear the yellow dress.”

“Thank you, I will,” Cynthia said, and the woman hung up.

That shocked Cynthia back to Ruth again; she stood in the center of
the room, turning about slowly and with muscles pulling with queer,
jerky little tugs. The message had purported to be a friendly
telephone call from some woman who knew her intimately; but Ruth
quickly estimated that that was merely what the message was meant to
appear. For if the woman really were so intimate a friend of Cynthia
Gail, she would not have made so short and casual a conversation
with a girl whom she could not have seen or communicated with since
Sunday. No; it was plain that the Germans again were aiding her;
plain that they had learned--perhaps from Hubert Lennon waiting for
her in the hotel lobby--about her afternoon engagement; plain, too,
that they were ordering her to go.

A new and beautiful yellow dress, suitable for afternoon wear, was
among the garments in the closet; there was an underskirt and
stockings and everything else. Ruth was Cynthia again as she slipped
quickly out of her street dress, took off shoes and stockings and
redressed completely. She found a hat which evidently was to be worn
with the yellow dress. So completely was she Cynthia now, as she
bent for a final look in the glass, that she did not think that she
looked better than Ruth Alden ever had; she wondered, instead,
whether she looked as well as she should. She found no coat which
seemed distinctly for the afternoon; so she put on the coat which
she had bought. She carried her knitting bag with her as before--it
was quite an advantage to have a receptacle as capacious as a
knitting bag which she could keep with her no matter where she went.
Descending to the ground floor, she found about the same number and
about the same sort of people passing back and forth or lounging in
the lobby. Hubert Lennon was there and he placed himself beside her
as she surrendered her room key.

“You’re perfectly corking, Cynthia!” he admired her, evidently
having decided during his wait that he could say her name.

Color--the delicate rose blush in her clear skin which Sam Hilton so
greatly liked--deepened on her cheek.

“All ready now, Hubert,” she said; her use of his name greatly
pleased him and he grasped her arm, unnecessarily, to guide her out.

“Just a minute,” she hesitated as she approached the telegraph desk.
“I’ve a wire to send to father.”

The plan had popped out with the impulse which had formed it; she
had had no idea the moment before of telegraphing to Charles Gail.
But now the ecstasy of the daring game--the game beginning here in
small perils, perhaps, but also perhaps in great; the game which was
swiftly to lead, if she could make it lead, across the sea and
through France into Switzerland and then into the land of the enemy
upon the Rhine--had caught her; and she knew instinctively how to
reply to that as yet uncomprehended telegram from her father.

She reached for the dispatch blanks before she remembered that,
though her handwriting would not be delivered in Decatur, still here
she would be leaving a record in writing which was not like Cynthia
Gail’s. So she merely took up the pen in her gloved fingers and gave
it to Hubert Lennon who had not yet put his gloves on.

“You write for me, please,” she requested. “Mr. Charles F. Gail,”
she directed and gave the home street number in Decatur. “Thanks for
your wire telling me to go ahead. I knew you’d back me. Love. Thia.”

“What?” Lennon said at the last word.

“Just sign it ‘Thia.’”

He did so; she charged the dispatch to her room and they went out.
The color was still warm in her face. If one of the men in the lobby
was a German stationed to observe how she did and if he had seen her
start the mistake of writing the telegram, he had seen also an
instant recovery, she thought.

A large, luxurious limousine, driven by a chauffeur in private
livery, moved up as they came to the curb. When they settled side by
side on the soft cushions, the driver started away to the north
without requiring instructions.

“You were fifteen years old when I last had a ride with you,” Hubert
obligingly informed her.

That was nine years ago, in nineteen nine, Cynthia made the mental
note; she had become twenty-four years old instead of twenty-two,
since the morning.

“But I knew you right away,” he went on. “Aunt Emilie would have
come for you but you see when she telephoned and found you weren’t
in at half-past one, she knew she couldn’t call for you and get to
Mrs. Corliss’ on time. And she’s a stickler for being on time.”

So it was to Mrs. Corliss’ they were going--to her great home on the
drive. The car was keeping on northward along the snow-banked
boulevard with the white and arctic lake away to the right and, on
the left, the great grounds of Mrs. Potter Palmer’s home.

“She’d have sent a maid for you,” Hubert explained, “but I said it
was stupid silly to send a maid after a girl who’s going into the
war zone.”

“I’m glad you came instead for another ride with me,” Cynthia said.

He reddened with pleasure. In whatever circles he moved, it was
plain he received no great attention from girls.

“I tried to get into army and navy both, Cynthia,” he blurted,
apropos of nothing except that he seemed to feel that he owed
explanation to her as to why he was not in uniform. “But they turned
me down--eyes. Even the Canadians turned me down. But Aunt Emilie’s
giving an ambulance; and they’re going to let me drive it. They get
under fire sometimes, I hear. On the French front.”

“They’re often under fire,” Cynthia assured. “A lot of ambulance men
have been killed and wounded; so that’s no slacker service.”

“Not if you can’t get in anything better,” he said, “but mighty
little beside what Gerry Hull’s been doing.”

She startled a little. He had spoken Gerry Hull’s name with far less
familiarity than Sam Hilton had uttered it that morning; but Hubert
Lennon’s was with the familiarity of one who knows personally the
man mentioned.

“You’ve seen him since he’s back?” Cynthia asked. It came to her
suddenly that they--he and she--were going to meet Gerry Hull!

The car was slowing before the turn in the driveway for Mrs.
Corliss’ city home; a number of cars were ahead and others took line
behind for the _porte cochère_ where guests were entering the house.

“Yes; I know him pretty well,” Hubert said with a sort of pitiful
pride. He was sensitive to the fact that, when he had spoken of
Gerry Hull, her interest in him had so quickened; but he was quite
unresentful of it. “I’ll see that he knows you, Cynthia,” he
promised.

She sat quiet, trying to think what to say to Hubert Lennon after
this; but he did not want the talk brought back to himself. He spoke
only of his friend until the man opened the door of the car; the
house door was opened at the same moment; and Cynthia, gathering her
coat about her and clutching close to her knitting bag, stepped out
of the car and into the hall, warm and scented with hot-house
flowers, murmurous with the voices and movement of many people in
the big rooms beyond. A man servant directed her to a room where
maids were in attendance and where she laid off her coat. She had
never in her life been at any affair larger than a wedding or a
reception to a congressman at Onarga; so it was a good deal all at
once to find oneself a guest of Mrs. Corliss’, for it was plain that
this reception was by no means a public affair but that the guests
all had been carefully selected; it was more to be present carrying
a knitting bag (fortunately many others brought knitting bags) in
which were twenty-three hundred dollars and a passport to France;
and something more yet to meet Gerry Hull--or rather, have him meet
you. For when she came out to the hall again, Hubert was waiting for
her.

“I can’t find Aunt Emilie just now, Cynthia,” he said. “But I’ve
Gerry. There’s no sense in getting into that jam. We’ll go to the
conservatory; and Gerry’ll come there. This way, Cynthia. Quick!”




CHAPTER IV: AT MRS. CORLISS’


She followed him about the fringes of the groups pressing into the
great front room where a stringed orchestra was starting the first,
glorious notes of the _Marseillaise_; and suddenly a man’s voice, in
all the power and beauty of the opera singer and with the passion of
a Frenchman singing for his people, burst out with the battle song:

    Allons, enfants de la Patrie,
    Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
    Contre nous de la tyrannie
    L’étendard sanglant est levé....

It lifted her as nothing had ever before. “Go, children of your
country; the day of glory is here! Against us the bloody standard of
tyranny is raised!...”

She had sung that marvelous hymn of the French since she was a
child; before she had understood it at all, the leap and lilt of the
verse had thrilled her. It had become to her next an historical song
of freedom; when the war started--and America was not in--the song
had ceased to resound from the past. The victory of the French upon
the Marne, the pursuit to the Aisne; then the stand at Verdun gave
it living, vibrant voice. Still it had been a voice calling to
others--a voice which Ruth might hear but to which she might not
reply. But now, as it called to her: “_Aux armes!_... _Marchons!
Marchons!_...” she was to march with it!

The wonder of that made her a little dizzy and set her pulse
fluttering in her throat. The song was finished and she was amid the
long fronds of palms, the hanging vines, and the red of winter roses
in the conservatory. She looked about and discovered Hubert Lennon
guiding Gerry Hull to her.

“Cynthia, this is Gerry Hull; Gerry, this is Cynthia Gail.”

He was in his uniform which he had worn in the French service; he
had applied to be transferred from his old escadrille to an American
squadron, Ruth knew; but the transfer was not yet effected. The
ribbons of his decorations--the _Croix de Guerre_, the _Médaille
Militaire_, the Cross of the Legion of Honor--ran in a little,
brilliant row across the left breast of his jacket. It bothered him
as her eyes went to them. He would not have sought the display--she
thought--of wearing his decorations here at home; but since he was
appearing in a formal--almost an official function--he had no choice
about it. And she recognized instantly that he had not followed his
friend out of the “jam” of the other rooms to meet her in order to
hear more praise of himself from her.

He was, indeed, far more interested in her than in himself. “Why,
I’ve met you before, Miss Gail,” he said, and evidently was puzzling
to place her.

Ruth went warm with pleasure. “I spoke to you on the street--when
your car stopped on Michigan Avenue this morning,” she confessed.
She had not been Cynthia Gail, then; but he could not know that.

“Of course! And I said some stuffy sort of thing to you, didn’t I?”

“I didn’t think it--stuffy,” Ruth denied, utilizing his word. There
were seats where they were; and suddenly it occurred to her, when he
glanced at them, that he was remaining standing because she was, and
that he would like to sit down, and delay there with her. She gasped
a little at this realization; and she seated herself upon a gaily
painted bench. He looked about before he sat down.

“Hello; I say, where’s Hub?”

Lennon had disappeared; and Ruth knew why. She had forgotten him in
the excitement of meeting Gerry Hull; so he had felt himself in the
way and had immediately withdrawn. But she could do nothing to mend
that matter now; she turned to Gerry Hull, who was on the bench
beside her.

He had more quickly banished any concern over his friend’s
disappearance and was observing Ruth with so frank an interest that,
instead of gazing away from her when she looked about at him, his
eyes for an instant rested upon hers; his were meditative, almost
wistful eyes for that moment. They made her think, suddenly, of the
little boy whose picture with his grandfather she used to see in her
father’s newspaper--an alert, energetic little boy, yet with a look
of wonder in his eyes why so much fuss was made about him.

“I seem to’ve been saying no end of stuffy things since I’ve been
back, Miss Gail; they appeared to be what I was expected to say. But
I’m about at the finish of ’em. I’m to say something here this
afternoon; and I’m going to say exactly what I think. Wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would,” Ruth said.

“Then you forgive me?”

“For what?”

“Posing like such a self-righteous chump in a cab that you felt you
ought to ask me what you should do!”

“You haven’t been posing,” Ruth denied for him again. “Why, when I
saw you, what amazed me was that--” she stopped suddenly as she saw
color come to his face.

“That I wasn’t striking an attitude? Look here, I’m--or I was--one
man in fifty thousand in the foreign legion; and one in thousands
who’ve been in the air a bit. I’d no idea what I was getting into
when they told me to come home here or I’d--” he stopped and shifted
the subject from himself with abrupt finality. “You’re going to
France, Hub tells me. You’ve been there in peacetime, of
course--Paris surely.”

Ruth nodded. She had not thought that, as Cynthia, she must have
been abroad until he was so certain of it.

“Did you ever go about old Paris and just poke around, Miss Gail?”

“In those quaint, crooked little streets which change their names
every time they twist?”

“The Rue des Saints Pères, the Rue Pavée--that name rather takes one
back, doesn’t it? Some time ago it must have been when in Paris a
citizen could describe where he lived by saying it was on ‘the paved
street.’”

“Yet it was only in the fifteenth century that wolves used to come
in winter into Paris.”

“To scare François Villon into his _Lodgings for a_ _Night_?” Gerry
said. “So you know that story of Stevenson’s, too?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose, though, you had to stay at the Continental, or the
Regina, or some hotel like that, didn’t you? I did at first, when my
tutor used to take me. You’d have been with your parents, of
course----”

“Of course,” Ruth said.

“But have you planned where you’ll stay now? You’ll choose your own
billets, I believe.”

Ruth appealed to her memories of Du Maurier and Victor Hugo; she had
read, long ago, _Trilby_ and _Les Misérables_, of course, and
_Notre-Dame de Paris_; and she knew a good bit about old Paris.

“The Latin Quarter’s cheapest, I suppose.”

“And any amount the most sport!”

She got along very well; or he was not at all critical. He was
relaxing with her from the strain of being upon exhibition; and he
seemed to be having a very good time. The joy of this made her bold
to plan with him all sorts of explorations of Paris when they would
meet over there with a day off. She looked away and closed her eyes
for a second, half expecting that when she opened them the sound of
music, and the roses, and palms, and conservatory, and Gerry Hull
must have vanished; but he was there when she glanced back. And she
noticed agreeable and pleasing things about him--the way his dark
hair brushed back above his temples, the character in his strong,
well-formed hands.

[Illustration: She looked away, half expecting the sound of the music,
and the roses, and palms, and Gerry Hull would vanish]

Lady Agnes came out looking for him; and he called her over:

“Oh, Agnes, here we are!”

So Ruth met Lady Agnes, too; but Lady Agnes took him away,
laughingly scolding him for having left her so long alone among all
those American people. Ruth did not follow; and while she lingered
beside the bench where he had sat with her, she warned herself that
Gerry Hull had paid her attention as a man of his breeding would
have paid any girl whom he had been brought out to meet. Then the
blood, warm within her, insisted that he had not disliked her; he
had even liked her for herself.

The approach of an elderly woman in a gray dress returned Ruth to
the realities and the risks of the fraud she had been playing to win
Gerry Hull’s liking. For the woman gazed at her questioningly and
swiftly came up.

Ruth arose. Was this Hubert Lennon’s “Aunt Emilie?” she wondered.
Had she recently seen the real Cynthia so that she was aware that
Ruth was not she?

No; the woman was calling her Cynthia; and with the careful
enunciation of the syllables, Ruth recognized the voice as that
which had addressed her over the telephone when she was in her room
at the hotel.

“Cynthia, you are doing well--excellently!” This could refer only to
the fact that she had met Gerry Hull already and had not displeased
him. “Develop this opportunity to the utmost; you may find him of
greatest possible use when you are in France!”




CHAPTER V: “YOU’RE NOT LIKE ANYONE ELSE”


The woman immediately moved away and left the conservatory. No one
could have observed her speaking to Ruth except, perhaps, Hubert
Lennon, who now had reappeared and, finding Ruth alone, offered his
escort shyly. If he had noticed and if he wondered what acquaintance
Cynthia had happened upon here, he did not inquire.

“We’d better go into the other rooms,” he suggested. “They’re
starting speeches.”

She accompanied him, abstractedly. Whatever question she had held as
to whether the Germans held her under surveillance had been
answered; but it was evident that so far, at least, her appearance
in the part of Cynthia Gail had satisfied them--indeed, more than
satisfied. What beset Ruth at this moment was the fact that she now
knew the identity of an unsuspected enemy among the guests in this
house; but she could not accuse that woman without at the same time
involving herself. It presented a nice problem in values; Ruth must
be quite confident that she possessed the will and the ability to
aid her side to greater extent than this woman could harm it; or she
must expose the enemy even at the cost of betraying herself.

She looked for the woman while Hubert led her through the first
large room in the front of the big house, where scores of guests who
had been standing or moving about were beginning to find places in
the rows of chairs which servants were setting up. Hubert took Ruth
to a small, nervously intent lady with glistening black hair and
brows, who was seated and half turned about emphatically conversing
with the people behind her.

“Aunt Emilie, here’s Cynthia,” Hubert said loudly to win her
attention; she looked up, scrutinized Ruth and smiled.

“I had to help Mrs. Corliss receive, dear; or I’d have called for
you myself. So glad Hubert has you here.”

Ruth took the hand which she outstretched and was drawn down beside
her. Aunt Emilie (Ruth knew no name for her in relation to herself
and therefore used none in her reply) continued to hold Ruth’s hand
affectionately for several moments and patted it with approval when
at last she let it go. Years ago she had been a close friend of
Cynthia Gail’s mother, it developed; Julia Gail had written her that
Cynthia was in Chicago on her way to France; Aunt Emilie had asked
Mrs. Corliss to telephone to Cynthia on Saturday inviting her here;
Aunt Emilie herself had telephoned on Sunday and Monday to the hotel
to find Cynthia, but vainly each time.

“Where in the world were you all that time, my dear child?”

A man’s voice suddenly rose above the murmur in the room. The man
was standing upon a little platform toward which the chairs were
faced and with him were an officer in the uniform of the French
Alpine chasseurs, Lady Agnes Ertyle, and Gerry Hull. For an instant
the start of the speaking was to Ruth only a happy interruption
postponing the problem of explanations to “Aunt Emilie”; but the
next minute Ruth had forgotten all about that small matter. Gerry
Hull, from his place on the platform, was looking for her.

The French officer, having been introduced, had commenced to address
his audience in emphatic, exalted English; the others upon the
platform had sat down. Gerry Hull’s glance, which had been going
about the room studying the people present, had steadied to the look
of a search for some special one; his eyes found Ruth and rested.
She was that special one. He looked away soon; but his eyes had
ceased to search and again, when Ruth glanced directly at him, she
found him observing her.

She leaned forward a little and tried not to look toward him or to
think about him too much; but that was hard to do. She had
recognized that, when Hubert Lennon had summoned Gerry Hull out to
the conservatory, something had been troubling him and he had been
on the brink of a decision. He had met her during the moments when
he must decide and, in a way, he had referred the decision to her.
“They’re going to make me say something here this afternoon; and
this time I’m going to say exactly what I think. Wouldn’t you?”

She had told him that she would, without knowing at all what it was
about. Now it seemed to her that, as his time for speaking
approached, he was finding his determination more difficult.

The French officer was making an extravagant address, praising
everyone here and all Americans for coming into the war to save
France and civilization; he was complimenting every American deed,
proclaiming gratitude in the name of his country for the aid which
America had given; and, while he was speaking thus excessively, Ruth
was aware that Gerry Hull was watching her most intently; and when
she glanced up at him she saw him draw up straighter in his chair
and sit there, looking away, with lips tight shut. The French
officer finished and, after the applause, Lady Agnes Ertyle was
introduced and she spoke earnestly and simply, telling a little of
the work of Americans in Belgium and in France, of the great value
of American contributions and moral support; she added her praise
and thanks for American aid.

It seemed to Ruth that once Gerry Hull was about to interrupt. But
he did not; no one else appeared to notice his agitation; everyone
was applauding the pretty English girl who had spoken so gracefully
and was sitting down. The gentleman who was making the introductions
was beginning to relate who Gerry Hull was and what he had done,
when Gerry suddenly stood up. Everyone saw him and clapped wildly;
the introducer halted and turned; he smiled and sat down, leaving
him standing alone before his friends.

Men here and there were rising while they applauded and called his
name; other men, women, and girls got to their feet. Hubert Lennon,
on Ruth’s left, was one of the first to stand up; his aunt was
standing. So Ruth arose then, too; everyone throughout the great
rooms was standing now in honor of Gerry Hull. He gazed about and
went white a little; he was looking again for someone lost in all
the standing throng; he was looking for Ruth! He saw her and studied
her queerly again for a moment. She sat down; others began settling
back and the rooms became still.

“I beg your pardon,” Ruth heard Gerry Hull’s voice apologizing first
to the man who had tried to introduce him. “I beg the pardon of you
all for what I’m going to say. It’s not a word of what I’m supposed
to say, I know; it’ll be just what I think and feel.

“We’re not doing our part, people!” he burst out passionately
without more preparation. “We’re still taking protection behind
England and France, as we’ve done since the start of the war! We
ought to be there in force now! God knows, we ought to have been
there in force three years ago! But instead of being on the battle
line with them in force even with theirs, our position is so
pitiable that we make our allies feel grateful for a few score of
destroyers and a couple of army divisions holding down quiet sectors
in Lorraine. That’s because our allies have become so used to
expecting nothing--or next to nothing--of America that anything at
all which we do fills them with such sincere amazement that they
compliment and overwhelm us with thanks of the sort you have heard.”

He turned about to the French officer and to Lady Agnes, who had
just spoken. “Forgive me!” he cried to them so that all in the rooms
could hear. “You know I mean no offense to you or lack of
appreciation of what you have said. You cannot tell the truth to my
people; I can for you, and I must!”

He straightened and spoke to his own people again. “On the day that
German uhlans rode across the Belgian border, Belgium and England
and France--yes, even Russia--looked to us to come in; or, at least,
to protest and, if our protest was not respected, to enforce it by
our arms. But we did nothing--nothing but send a few dollars for
Belgian relief, a few ships of grain and a few civilians to
distribute it. The outrages of the Boche beasts went on--Termonde,
Louvain, the massacres of the Armenians, the systematic starvation
and enslavement of Belgians, Poles, Serbians; and we subscribed a
little more money for relief. Here and there American missionaries
saved a life or two. That’s all we did, my friends! So here in our
country and in our own newspapers the German Imperial Embassy paid
for and had printed advertisements boasting that they were going to
sink without warning ships sailing from our ports with our own
people aboard; and they sank the _Lusitania_!

“Then England and France and the remnant of Belgium said, ‘Surely
now America must come in!’ But you know what we did!”

He stopped, breathless, and Ruth was leaning forward, breathless
too. The passion which had seized and was swaying him was rousing
like passions in the others before him; his revolt had become their
revolt; and they warmed and kindled with him. But she did not.
Though this outburst of his soul brought to her feeling for him,
himself, beyond what she could have believed, the meaning of what he
said did not so inflame her. Her feeling was amazingly personal to
him.

“We protested,” he was going on. “Protested; and did nothing! They
sank our ships and murdered our own people under the American flag;
and we continued to protest! And England and France and the nations
holding back the Boche with them ceased to honor us with
expectations of action; so, expecting nothing, naturally they became
more grateful and amazed at anything which we happened to do. When
the Kaiser told us he might allow us--if we were very good--one ship
a week to Europe, provided we sent him notice in advance and we
painted it in stripes, just as he said, and when that at last was
too much for us to take, they honored us in Europe with wondering
what we would do; and they thanked and complimented us, their new
ally, for sending them more doctors and medical supplies without
charging them for it, and after a while a few divisions of soldiers.

“God knows I would say no word against our men who have gone to
France; I speak for them! For I have been an American in France and
have learned some of the shame of it! The shame,” he repeated
passionately, “of being an American! I have gone about an ordinary
duty, performing it much after the fashion of my comrades in the
French service--or in the British--and when I have returned, I have
found that what I happened to do is the thing picked out for special
mention and praise to the public, when others who have done the same
or more than myself have not had that honor. Because I was an
American! They feel they must yet compliment and thank Americans for
doing what they have been doing as a matter of course all this time
that we have stayed out; so they thank and praise us for beginning
to do now what we ought to have done in 1914.

“We have been sitting here--you and I--letting our allies thank us
for at last beginning to fight a little of our war! Think of that
when they have been giving themselves and their all--all--in our
cause for three and a half years!”

He stepped back suddenly and stood with bowed head as though--Ruth
thought--he had meant to say more, but suddenly had found that he
could not. She was trembling as she sat staring at him; she was
alone in her chair now; for the people all about, overswept by their
feelings, were standing up again, and clapping wildly, and calling
out: “France! France!... England! France!... Belgium!... England!”
they were crying in adulation.

She saw him again for an instant; he had stepped back a little
farther, and raised his head, and was gazing at the people
acclaiming him and the allies for whom he had spoken. He stared
about and seemed to seek her--at least, he gazed about when this
great acclaim suddenly bewildered him, as he had gazed before he had
spoken and when his eyes had found her. She stood up then; but he
turned about to Lady Agnes, who had risen and was beside him; the
people in front of Ruth screened him from sight and when she got
view of the platform again he was gone.

The guests were leaving their chairs and moving toward the rooms
where refreshments were being served; but it was many minutes before
Ruth heard anyone mention other matters than the war and Gerry
Hull’s speech. That had been a thoroughly remarkable and sincere
statement of the American position, Ruth heard the people about her
saying; to have heard it was a real experience.

It had come as the climax of what for Ruth was far more than that;
the darkening of the early winter night outside the drawn curtains
of the windows, the tinkling of a little clock for the half
hour--half-past four--brought to her the amazing transformation
worked upon Ruth Alden since, scarcely six hours before, the
wonderful wand of war had touched her. With the dawn of this same
day which was slipping so fast into the irrevocable past, she had
awakened to dream as of a wish unrealizable that she might welcome
Gerry Hull home; now she knew him; she had talked with him alone;
when she had been among all his friends in the other room, he had
sought her with his eyes. He had disappeared from the rooms now; and
no one seemed to know where he had gone, though many inquired. But
Ruth knew; so she slipped away from Hubert Lennon and from his Aunt
Emilie, who had forgotten all about asking where Cynthia had been
the last two days; and Ruth returned to the conservatory.

Upon that bench where they had sat together, hidden by the palms,
and hanging vines, and the roses, she saw him sitting alone, bent
forward with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands,
staring down at the floor.

He looked up quickly as he heard her step; she halted, frightened
for a moment by her own boldness. If he had chosen that spot for his
flight from the others, it would mean--she had felt--that he was
willing that she should return there. But how did she know that?
Might it not be wholly in her fancy that, since they had separated,
he had thought about her at all?

“Hello, Miss Gail!” he hailed her quickly, but so quietly that it
was certain he wished no one else to know that he was there. “I was
wondering how I could get you here.”

Her heart began beating once more. “I wondered if you’d be here,”
she said; he could make of that a good deal what he liked.

He stood up. “Let’s stay here, please,” he asked her, whispering;
and he bent a little while he waited for her to be seated, hiding
from sight of anyone who might glance over the tops of the palms. He
was beside her on the bench now.

“I want you to tell me what I did in there just now, Miss Gail,” he
asked. “Agnes Ertyle can’t, of course; others, whom I know pretty
well, won’t. But you will, I think.”

The complete friendliness of this confidence made Ruth wonder what
he might have known about Cynthia Gail, which let him thus so
instinctively disclose himself to her; but it was not to Cynthia
Gail; it was to her, herself, Ruth!

“I’ve only known you for an hour, Miss Gail; but I’d rather have
your honest opinion than that of any other American.”

From the way he said that, she could not tell whether he had chosen
his word purposely to except Lady Agnes Ertyle from any comparison
with her; and she wanted to know!

“I think you meant to say a very, very fine thing,” Ruth told him
simply.

“But I actually said----”

“You’ve been a long time away from home--from America, our country,”
Ruth interrupted him before he could get her into greater
difficulties. “You’ve only known me an hour; but, of course, I’ve
known you--or about you--for a good many years. Everyone has. You’ve
been away ever since the start of the war, of course; and even
before that you were away, mostly in England, for the greater part
of your time, weren’t you?”

“I was at school at Harrow for a while,” he confessed. “And I was at
Cambridge in 1913-1914.”

“That’s what I thought. So while you’ve called yourself an American
and you’ve meant to stay an American--I know you meant that--you
couldn’t quite really become one, could you?”

He drew back from her a trifle and his eyes rested upon hers a
little confused, while color crept into his brown face and across
his forehead.

“Please tell me just what you want to,” he begged.

“I don’t want to tell you a thing unpleasant!” she cried quietly.
“And I can’t, unless you’ll believe that I never admired anyone so
much as you when you were speaking--I mean anyone,” she qualified
quickly, “who was saying things which I believed all wrong!”

Terror for her boldness caught her again; but it was because he had
seen that with him she must be bold--or honest--that he had wanted
her there; for he did want her there and more than before. While he
had been speaking, she had been thinking about him--thinking as well
as feeling for him; and she had been thinking about him ever
since--thinking thoughts her own, or at least distinct from his and
from those of his friends in the other rooms who had so acclaimed
him and from whom he had fled. He realized it; and that was why he
wanted her.

“I believe that to be a true American is the highest honor in the
world today,” she said with the simplicity of deep feeling. “I
believe that, so far from having anything to be ashamed about, an
American--particularly such an American as you might be----”

“Might be!” he repeated.

“Has more to be rightly proud of than anyone else! And not alone
because America is in the war now, but because--at the cost of
staying out so long--our country came in when and how she did! You
understand I say nothing against our allies--nothing like what you
have said against our own country! Belgium got the first attack of
the Germans and fought back, oh, so nobly, and so bravely, and
hopelessly; but Belgium was invaded! France fought, as everyone
knows, in self-defense and for a principle; England fought in
self-defense, too, as well as for a principle--for were not the
German guns almost at her shores? But we have gone in for a
principle--and in self-defense, too, perhaps; but for the principle
first! Oh, there is a difference in that! A hundred million people
safe and unthreatened--for whether or not we really were safe and
unthreatened, we believed we were--going into a war without idea of
any possible gain or advantage solely for a principle! Oh, I don’t
mean to make a speech to you.”

“Go on!” he ordered. “I’ve just made one; you go on now.”

“You spoke about the Kaiser’s order to us about how to paint our
ships, as if the insult of that was what at last brought us in! How
little that had to do with it for us! It merely happened to come at
the time we could at last go in--when a hundred million people, not
in danger which they could see or feel, decided to go in, knowing
even better than those who had decided earlier what it was going to
mean. For the war was different then from what it was at first; the
Russia of the Czar and of the empire was gone; and in France and in
England there was a difference, too. Oh, I don’t know how to say it;
just France, at first, was fighting as France and for France against
Germany; and England, for England, was doing the same. And America
couldn’t do that--I mean fight for America; she couldn’t join with
allies who were fighting for themselves or even for one another. The
side of the allies had to become more than that before we could go
in; and it is and we’re in! Oh, I don’t know how or when it will
appear; but I know--know that before long you will be prouder to be
an American than you ever dreamed you could be if we had gone in
like the others when you thought we should.”

She had been gazing at him and, for a few moments, he had been
staring in bewilderment at her; but now he was turned away and she
could see from the set of his lips, from the pulse throbbing below
his temple as the muscles of his face pulled taut, how she had
offended him.

“Thank you,” he said to her shortly.

“I’ve hurt you!”

“Didn’t you mean to?”

“Not this way.”

“You told what you thought; I asked to know it. How do you happen to
be here, Miss Gail?” he asked with sudden directness after a pause.

Ruth recollected swiftly Cynthia Gail’s connections through Hubert
Lennon’s aunt with Mrs. Corliss and she related them to Gerry Hull,
perforce; and this unavoidable deception distressed her more than
all the previous ones she had played. She realized that, in order to
understand what she had said, he was trying to understand her; and
she wished that she could tell him that she was Ruth Alden, working,
only as late as that morning, in Hilton Brothers’ office.

“You’re not like anyone else here,” he said, without pressing his
inquiry further. “Hub Lennon told me that he had a different sort of
girl with him. These other people are all like myself; you saw the
way they took what I said. They didn’t take it as said against them;
they’ve been in the war, heart and soul, since the first. You’ve
only come in when we--I mean America,” he corrected with a wince,
“came in. I think I felt that without knowing it; that’s why I
talked to you more than to all the rest together. That’s why I
needed to see you again; you’re more of an American, I guess, than
anyone else here.”

He said that with a touch of bitterness which prevented her offering
reply.

“You haven’t hurt me as me,” he denied. “If you just told me that my
country believed I was wrong and had been fighting for something
lower than it was willing to fight for until April, 1917, why that
would be all right. But what you have said is against the finest,
noblest, most chivalrous men the world ever knew--a good many of
them dead, now, fallen on the field of honor, Americans--Americans
of the highest heart, Norman Prince, Kiffen Rockwell, Vic Chapman,
and the rest! If being American means to wait, after you see beasts
like the Germans murdering women and children, until you’ve
satisfied your smug soul that everyone who’s fighting the beast is
just your sort, they weren’t Americans and I’m not an American
either, thank God!”

He arose from beside her in his overwhelming emotion; and she,
without knowing what she did, put out a hand, and caught his sleeve,
and pulled him down beside her again.

“Wait!” she almost commanded him. “I can’t have you misunderstand me
so! This morning when I woke up--it was before I knew I was to meet
you--I tried to imagine knowing you!”

“To tell me what you have?”

“To thank you for what you have done!”

“You’re a strange person!”

“Oh, I can’t explain everything even to myself!” Ruth cried. “I only
know that you--and the men you’ve mentioned--had the wonderful right
to do, of yourselves, fine and brave things before our country had
the right!”

That was sheer stupidity to him, she saw; and she could not make it
clearer. He wanted to leave her now; but he did not forget himself
as he had the moment earlier. He waited for her to rise and he
accompanied her to the other rooms. They separated without formal
leave-taking as others claimed him, and Hubert Lennon found her.
Hubert and his aunt took her back to the hotel, where Aunt
Emilie--Ruth yet had no name for her--offered an invitation for
luncheon tomorrow or the day after. Ruth accepted for the second day
and went up to her room, where she locked herself in, took off the
yellow dress, and flung herself face downward across the bed.

Except for the chocolate and little cakes served at Mrs. Corliss’,
she had eaten nothing since breakfast; but she scarcely thought to
be hungry or considered her weariness now. What a day had been given
to her; and how frightfully she had bungled it! She had met Gerry
Hull, and he had found interest in her, and she had taken advantage
of his interest only to offend, and insult him, and turn him away!
The Germans, upon whose support she must depend in all her plans,
had given her a first definite order; and she had completely
disregarded it in her absorption in offending Gerry Hull. At any
moment, therefore, they might take action against her--either direct
action of their own, or give information which would expose her to
the American authorities, and bring about her arrest and disgrace. A
miserable end, now, not only to her great resolves of that morning,
but to any possible rehabilitation with Gerry Hull! For if that
morning she had dreamed of meeting him, now this night a thousand
times intensified she thought of him again and again--constantly, it
seemed. And yet she would not have taken back a word of that which
had angered him and turned him away.

She got up at last and went down alone to dinner; and, when nothing
more happened, she returned to her own room, where after more
carefully going over all Cynthia Gail’s things, she took plain paper
and an envelope and wrote a short note to Sam Hilton, informing him
that most important personal matters suddenly had forced her to give
up her position with him; she wrote the landlady at her boarding
house that she had been called home and would either return or send
for her trunk later. She mailed these herself and went to bed.

The next morning she bought a small typewriter, of the sort which
one can carry traveling, and took up Cynthia Gail’s correspondence.
Neither the mail of that day nor the telephone presented to her any
difficult problem; and she had no new callers. Indeed, except for
Hubert Lennon, who “looked by”--as he spoke of it--just before noon,
she encountered no one who had anything to say to her until, walking
out early in the afternoon, she met upon the street the woman in
gray who had given her the order about Gerry Hull on yesterday
afternoon.

Ruth went a little weak with fright when the woman caught step
beside her; but the woman at once surprised her with reassurance.

“Gerry Hull returns to France from here,” the woman informed
abruptly. “He will be transferred to the American air service there;
he will sail from New York probably on the _Ribot_ next week. That
is a passenger vessel, carrying cargo, of course; but not yet used
for troop shipments. Passengers proceed as individuals. You will
probably be allowed a certain amount of choice in selecting your
ship. So you shall report at New York and endeavor to secure passage
upon the _Ribot_. Understand?”

“Perfectly,” Ruth said.

“Your friendship with Gerry Hull will prove invaluable in France! Do
nothing to jeopardize it! You have done with him, well! But you are
in too much danger here; go East tonight; wait there.”

The woman went away. How much did she know about what had passed
with Gerry Hull, Ruth wondered. She had seen, probably, that Ruth
was with him again in the conservatory after his speech and that
they had stayed there a long time together. She had done with him,
well! She smiled woefully to herself; at least it seemed to have
aided her that the Germans thought so.

It would have puzzled her more, certainly, if she had known that
after the time when Gerry Hull and she forgot to whisper and forgot,
indeed, everyone but themselves, the woman had heard almost every
word which was said; and that the woman’s opinion of the girl who
was playing the part of Cynthia Gail was that she was a very clever
one to know enough and dare enough to take single and violent
opposition to Gerry Hull. For the Germans, in preparation for this
war, had made a most elaborate and detailed study of psychology of
individuals and of nations. That study of nations has not shown
conspicuously successful results; but their determination of factors
which are supposed to influence individuals is said to have fared
far better.

Their instructions to a woman--or a girl--who is commanded to make
an impression upon a man inform that a girl in dealing with a weak
character progresses most certainly and fastest by agreeing and
complying; but when one has to do with a man of strong character,
opposition and challenge to him bring the surest result.

Of course that is not an exclusively German discovery; and to act in
accordance with it, one is not obliged to be truly a German spy and
to know it from the tutorings of a German psychologist. Indeed, one
does not have to know it at all; one need merely be a young girl,
thoughtful and honest, as well as impulsive and of quick but deep
passions, who admires and cares so very much for a young man who has
talked serious things with her, that she cannot just say yes to his
yes and no to his no, but must try at once to work out the
difference between them.

Not to know it is hard on that girl, particularly when she is
setting out upon an adventure which at once cuts her off from
everyone whom she has known.

Ruth had no companion at all. She had to write to her own mother in
Onarga, of course; and, after buying with cash an order for two
thousand dollars, she sent it to her mother with a letter saying
that she was assigned to a most wonderful work which was taking her
abroad. She was not yet free to discuss the details; but her mother
must trust her and know that she was doing a right and wise thing;
and her mother must say nothing about it to anyone at all. It might
keep her away for two years or more; so the people who were paying
her expenses had forwarded her this money for home. Ruth wished her
mother to send for her clothes and her trunk from the boarding
house; Ruth would not need them. And if any inquiry came for Ruth
from Hilton Brothers or elsewhere, Ruth had gone East to take a
position. There was no use writing her at the old addresses; she
would send an address later.

She knew her mother; and she knew that her mother was sure enough of
her so that she would do as asked and not worry too much.

So upon that same afternoon, Ruth packed up Cynthia Gail’s things;
and she wrote to Cynthia Gail’s parents and to Second Lieutenant
George Byrne at Camp Grant, signing the name below the writing as
Cynthia Gail had signed it upon her passport.

That passport was ceasing to be a mere possession and was soon to be
put to use; so Ruth practiced long in signing the name. The
description of Cynthia Gail as checked on the passport was almost
faultless for herself; height, five feet six and a half inches;
weight, 118 pounds; face, oval; eyes, blue; hair, yellow; and so
with all the rest. The photograph of Cynthia Gail was pasted upon
the passport and upon it was stamped the seal of the United States,
as well as a red-ink stamping which went over the edge of the
photograph upon the paper of the passport. It was very possible,
Ruth thought, that the German girl for whom this passport was
intended would have removed that picture of Cynthia Gail and
substituted one of herself; to do that required an emboss seal of
the United States, besides the rubber stamp of the red ink. Ruth did
not doubt that the Germans possessed replicas of these and also the
skill to forge the substitution. But she possessed neither.

Moreover, the photograph of Cynthia Gail seemed to Ruth even more
like herself than it had at first. The difference was really more in
expression than in the features themselves; and Ruth, consciously or
unconsciously, had become more like that girl in the picture. She
had, also, the identical dress in which the picture was taken. She
determined to wear that when she presented the passport and risk the
outcome. Her advantage so far had been that no one had particular
reason to suspect her; she had fitted herself into the relations
already arranged to take Cynthia Gail to France and they seemed
capable, of their own momentum, to carry her on.

Hubert Lennon “looked by” again later in the afternoon and she asked
him to tell his aunt that she was going away. He was much concerned
and insistent upon doing what he could to aid her.

“Do you know when you’ll be sailing?” he asked.

“I hope next week,” she said.

“Could you possibly go on the _Ribot_?”

“Why on the _Ribot_?”

“Gerry Hull’s just got word that he’s to join again on the other
side,” Hubert said, “so he’ll be going back next week on the
_Ribot_, he thinks.”

Ruth checked just in time a “Yes, I know.”

“I’m going to try to get across with him,” Hubert added. Ruth felt
liking again for this young man who always put his friend before
himself.

“That’s good. I hope surely I can get on the _Ribot_.”

“Aunt Emilie knows people in New York who’ll help arrange it for
you, if I ask ’em. You’ll let me?”

“Please!” Ruth accepted eagerly. She wanted exceedingly to know one
other thing; but she delayed asking and then made the query as
casual as she could.

“Lady Agnes stays in Chicago a while?”

Hubert colored as this question ended for him his pretense with
himself that she wanted to be on the _Ribot_ because of him.

“No; she’s going when Gerry goes. She plans to be on the _Ribot_
too. They always intended to return at the same time.”

“Of course,” Ruth said. What wild fancies she followed!

Hubert went off; but returned to take her to the train. He brought
with him letters from his aunt--credentials of Ruth as Cynthia Gail
to powerful people who did not know Cynthia Gail, and who were asked
to further her desires in every way.

Thus, at the end of seven days, Ruth Alden sailed for the first time
away from her native land upon the _Ribot_ for Bordeaux to
become--in the reports of the American authorities who approved and
passed her on--a worker in the devastated districts of France; to
become, in whatever report the agents of Hohenzollernism in America
made to their superiors, a dependable and resourceful spy for
Germany; to become--in the resolution she swore to herself and to
the soul of Cynthia Gail and the prayers she prayed--an emissary for
her cause and her country into the land of the enemy who would know
no mercy to such as herself.




CHAPTER VI: “WE’RE FIGHTING”


There is a thrill upon awaking on your first morning on board a ship
at sea which all the German U-boats under the ocean can scarcely
increase. You may imagine all you please what it may be; and it will
amaze you with something more. Ruth Alden had imagined; and her
first forenoon on shipboard was filled with surprises.

She had gone aboard from the New York quay at nine the evening
before, as she had been warned to do; she had looked into her
cabin--a small, square white compartment with two bunks, upper and
lower, an unupholstered seat, a washbowl with a looking glass beside
the porthole and with a sort of built-in bureau with four drawers,
above which was posted conspicuously the rules to be observed in
emergencies. These were printed in French and English and were
illustrated by drawings of exactly how to adjust the life-preservers
to be found under all berths. Someone, whose handbaggage bore the
initials “M. W.” and who evidently was to share the cabin with her,
had been in before her and gone out. Ruth saw that the steward
disposed her cabin baggage beside M. W.’s; she shut herself in a
moment after the steward had gone, touching the pillow of her bunk,
reading the rules again, trying the water-taps. She stood with shut
eyes, breathing deliciously the strange, scrubbed, salty smells of a
deep-water boat; she opened the door and went out to the deck with
the darkness of the Hudson on one hand; upon the other, the
myriad-lighted majesty of New York.

She was standing there at the rail gazing up at the marvelous city
when Hubert Lennon found her. He merely wanted to make sure she was
aboard. Gerry Hull and Captain Lescault--he was the French officer
who had spoken at Mrs. Corliss’--and an English captain, Forraker,
of the same party, were aboard now; Lady Agnes and the Englishwomen
with whom she traveled also were aboard, Hubert said.

He was glad to find that Cynthia was all right; but he said that a
nasty sea was running outside; the _Ribot_ might go out at any time.
Hubert thought Cynthia had better go to bed and get all the sleep
she could.

Ruth went below, not with any idea of sleeping, but to avoid meeting
Gerry Hull just yet. That she was aboard the _Ribot_ under orders
did not undo the fact that she was here for the conscious purpose of
furthering her acquaintance with him. He must guess that, she
thought--he from whom she had heard nothing at all since that
afternoon at Mrs. Corliss’.

Ruth was ready for bed when someone put a key in the cabin door, but
knocked before turning it, and a girl’s pleasant voice inquired,
“All right to come in?”

“All right,” Ruth said, covering up in bed.

A dark-haired, dark-eyed girl of twenty-six or seven entered. “I’m
Milicent Wetherell,” she introduced herself. “I’m from St. Louis;
I’m going to Paris for work in a _vestiaire_.”

Ruth sat up and put out her hand; she liked this girl on sight. “I’m
Ru----Cynthia Gail of Decatur, Illinois,” she caught herself
swiftly. It was the first time in the eight days that she had been
Cynthia that she had made even so much of a slip; but Milicent
Wetherell did not notice it.

Milicent went to bed and turned out the light. The boat did not
move; and after indefinite hours of lying still in the dark, Ruth
dropped to sleep. When she awoke it was daylight; the ship was
swaying, falling, rising; the tremor of engines shook it. They were
at sea.

The waves were higher than any Ruth had encountered before, but they
were slower and smoother too--not nearly so jumpy and choppy as the
Lake Michigan surf in a strong wind. The big steamer rose and rolled
to them far more steadily than the vessels upon which Ruth had
voyaged on holidays on the lake. Milicent Wetherell, in the lower
berth, lay miserably awake with no desire whatever to get up; but
Ruth let the stewardess lead her to the bath; she dressed and found
the way to the dining-saloon. She was supplied, along with a number
designating her “abandon ship” place in starboard lifeboat No. 7, a
numeral for a seat at a table.

At this hour of half after nine, there were perhaps fifty men at
breakfast and just five other women or girls; four men were seated
at the table to which Ruth was led--Captain Forraker one of them. He
arose as she approached. Possibly he remembered her, Ruth thought,
from an introduction at Mrs. Corliss’; much more probably Hubert
Lennon--who undoubtedly had had her placed at this table--had
reminded Captain Forraker about her. His three table-companions
arose and Captain Forraker presented them to her; they were all
English--two young officers and one older man, in rank a colonel,
who had been about some ordnance inspection work in America. Ruth
sat down; they sat down and resumed their talk; and Ruth got the
first of her morning amazements. She was in a foreign land, already;
she was not just on the way there, though still in sight of Long
Island. She was now in Europe, with Europeans thinking and talking,
not as guests of America, but as Europeans at home again.

Ruth had been brought up, as a good American, to believe her country
the greatest in the world; and, implicitly, she believed it. She
recognized that sons and daughters of other nations likewise were
reared to believe their native land the best and their people the
noblest; but she never had been able to quite believe that they
really could think so. They must make an exception, down deep in
their consciousness, for America, she was sure; however loyal they
might be to their own institutions and to their own fellows, they
must admire more highly the American ideals of freedom and
democracy, and they must consider that the people who lived by and
for those ideals were potentially, at least, the greatest.

It was a momentous experience, therefore, to hear her country
discussed--not in an unfriendly way or even with prejudice, but by
open-minded foreigners trying to inform one another of the facts
about America as they had found them; America was a huge but quite
untried quantity; its institutions and ideals seemed to them
interesting, but on the whole not nearly so good as their own;
certainly there was no suggestion of their endowing Americans with
superior battle abilities, therefore. The nation--that nation
founded more than a hundred and forty years ago which was to Ruth
the basis of all being--was to them simply an experiment of which no
one could yet tell the outcome.

They did not say that, of course; they said nothing at all to which
she could take the slightest exception. They simply brought to her
the brevity and unconclusiveness of a century of independent
existence in the perspective of a thousand; their national thought
started not with 1776 but with the Conquest or, even earlier, when
the Roman legions abandoned Britain and King Arthur reigned.

When they spoke of their homes, as they did once, and Ruth found
opportunity to inquire of one of them how long he had had his home
in Sussex, he told her:

“The present house goes back to 1582.”

It rather made her gasp. No wonder that a man of a family which had
occupied the “present” house since before the Pilgrims sailed,
looked upon America as an unproved venture.

“They’re in it to the end now, I consider,” this man commented later
to his companion when they returned to the discussion of America and
the war.

“Quite so, probably,” the other said. “The South went to absolute
exhaustion in their Civil War.”

“Absolutely,” the Sussex man agreed. “North probably would have too,
if necessary.”

They were estimating American will and endurance, not by pretty
faiths and protestations, but by what Americans, in their short
history, had actually shown.

“But this is foreign war, of course;” the colonel qualified the
judgment dubiously.

The man whose “present” house went back to 1582 nodded thoughtfully.

Ruth received all this eagerly; it could not in the least shake her
own confidence in her people; but it gave her better comprehension
of the ideas which Gerry Hull had gained from his association with
Europeans. And this morning, when she was certain to meet him, she
wished--oh she wished to an incredible degree--to understand him
more fully than before. She learned from a remark of Captain
Forraker’s that Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes had breakfasted early and
had gone out on deck. Ruth had intended to go on deck after
breakfast; but now she changed her mind. She went to the saloon; and
hardly was she there, when Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes came in from
the cold.

They were laughing together at something which had happened without.
Ruth saw them before either of them noticed her; and her heart
halted in the excitement of expectancy during the instant Gerry
Hull’s glance went about the saloon. He saw her; nodded to her and
looked at once to Lady Agnes, who immediately advanced to Ruth,
greeting her cordially and with perfect recollection of having
talked with her at Mrs. Corliss’. Upon this French ship bound for
Europe, the English girl was at home as the Englishmen at the
breakfast table had been; she felt herself, in a sense, a hostess of
Ruth.

“You’ve been about the ship yet, Miss Gail?” Gerry Hull asked.

“Only a little last night,” Ruth said.

“Come out on deck then,” he invited her. “Done for just now, Agnes?”
he asked.

“Just now,” Agnes said. “But I know you’re not. Go on!” she bid,
smiling at him as his eyes came to hers.

Ruth saw it as she started away to her cabin for her coat. There had
been some concern--not much, but some--in Agnes Ertyle’s look that
first time she discovered Gerry Hull and Ruth together; there was no
suggestion of concern now.

“Hub’s sick, poor chap,” Gerry told Ruth when she came out and they
set off side by side up the promenade deck against the cold, winter
wind. “He wanted me to tell you that’s why he couldn’t look you up
this morning.”

Had Hub--her loyal, self-derogatory Hub--therefore arranged with his
friend to give her this attention, Ruth wondered. Not that Gerry
Hull offered himself perfunctorily; he was altogether too well bred
for that. He held out his hand to her as the wind threatened to
sweep her from her feet; she locked arms with him and together they
struggled forward to the bow where a spray shield protected them and
they turned to each other and rested.

“Pretty good out here, isn’t it?” he asked, drawing deep breaths of
the cold, salt air, his dark cheeks glowing.

“Glorious!” Ruth cried. “I never----” she checked herself quickly,
almost forgetting.

“Crossed in winter before?”

“No.”

“Neither’ve I--in real winter weather; except when coming home this
last time.”

Ruth glanced up at him and caught his eyes pondering her. He had
meant merely to be courteous to her when meeting her on shipboard;
but too much had passed between them, in their brief, tempestuous
first meeting. He was feeling that as well as she! The gage which
she had thrown before him was not to be ignored. However certainly
he may have thought that he would be merely polite to this girl who
had--he deemed--insulted his comrades and himself, however
determinedly he had planned to chat with her about wind and weather,
he wanted to really talk with her now! And however firmly Ruth had
decided to avoid any word which could possibly offend him, still she
found herself replying:

“Then you think of Chicago as your home?”

“Of course; why not?”

She turned her back more squarely to the wind and gazed down the
length of the deck, hesitating.

“I might as well own up, Miss Gail,” he said to her suddenly. “I’m
still mad.”

“At me?”

“At you. For a while I was so mad that I didn’t want to see you or
think of you,” he admitted with the frankness which had enabled him
to ask her, directly, how she happened to be at Mrs. Corliss’. “But
that didn’t seem to do me any good. So I called up your hotel----”

“You did? When?”

“After you were gone--about two days after. They had no address for
you and Hub had none. I asked him.”

Ruth trembled with joyous excitement.

“I wanted to tell you better what I meant,” he went on. “And to find
out more from you.”

“About?”

“What we’d been arguing. I told you that day I’d never had a chance
to talk over affairs with an American like you; and I hadn’t later.

“You see,” he explained after a moment of thought, “it seemed to me
that the other people I met at home--or most of them, anyway--went
into the war as a sort of social event. I don’t mean that they made
light of it; they didn’t. They were heart and soul in the cause; and
a good many of them did a lot of real work. But they didn’t react to
any--original ideas, as far as I could make out. They imported their
opinions and sympathies. And the ones who were hottest to have
America in the war weren’t the people who’d been most of their lives
in America; but the ones who’d been in England or France. I told you
that day that what they said was just what I’d been hearing on the
other side.”

In spite of the canvas shield, it was very cold where they were
standing. Gerry moved a bit as he talked; and Ruth stepped with him,
letting him lead her to a door which he opened, to discover a little
writing room or card room which happened to be deserted just then.
He motioned to her to precede him; and when she sat down upon one of
the upholstered chairs fixed before a table, he took the place
opposite, tossing his cap away and loosening his coat. She
unbuttoned her coat and pulled off her heavy gloves. She had made no
reply, and he seemed to expect none, but to be satisfied with her
waiting.

“I suppose you’re thinking that’s the way I got my opinions too,” he
said. “But it’s not quite true. I wasn’t trying to be English or
French or foreign in any way. I was proud--not ashamed--to be
American. Why, at school in England they used to have a regular game
to get me started bragging about America and Chicago and our West. I
liked the people over there; but I liked our people better.
Grandfather--well, he seemed to me about the greatest sort of man
possible; and his friends and father’s friends who used to come to
look me up at Harrow once in a while--some of ’em were pretty raw
and uncouth, but I liked to show ’em off! I did. They’d all done
something themselves; and most of ’em were still doing things--big
things--and putting in eight or ten hours a day in their offices.
They weren’t gentlemen at all in the sense that my friends at Harrow
knew English gentlemen; but I said they were the real thing.
America--my country--was made up of men who really did things!

“Then the war came and showed us up! I tell you, Miss Gail, I
couldn’t believe it at first. It seemed to me that the news couldn’t
be getting across to America; or that lies only were reaching you.
Then the American newspapers came to France and everyone could see
that we knew and stayed out!”

“Last week,” Ruth said, “and yesterday; and before I met you this
morning, I knew how to tell you what I tried to that day at Mrs.
Corliss’. I’ve thought more about that, I’m sure, than anything else
recently; but now--” she gazed across the little table at him and
shook her head--“it’s no use. It’s not anything one can argue, I
guess. It’s just faith and feeling--faith in our own people,
Lieutenant Hull!”

She saw, as he watched her, that she was disappointing him and that
he had been hoping that, somehow, she could resolve the doubts of
his own people which possessed him; she saw--as she had observed at
Mrs. Corliss’--that his eyes lingered upon her face, upon her hands,
as though he liked her; but her stubbornness in upholding those
people whom she would not even try to explain, offended him again.
He glanced out the port above her.

“We’re picking up a cruiser escort,” he said suddenly. “Let’s go out
and look her over.”

So they were on deck in the cold and wind again. And during the rest
of that day, and upon the following days, almost every hour brought
her into some sort of association with him on the decks, in the
lounge, or in the writing rooms, during the morning; luncheon at the
same table. Then the afternoon, as the morning, would be made up of
hours when she would be sitting in the warm, bright saloon with her
French war-study book before her and she would be carefully
rehearsing “_Masque respirateur_--respirator; _lunettes_--goggles;
_nauge de gaz_--gas fumes ...” when she would hear his quick,
impulsive step or his clear, pleasant voice speaking to someone and
Ruth would get _combat animé_ and _combat décousu_ hopelessly mixed.
She would go out to walk the deck again with Hubert--who was
apologetically up and about when the seas were smoother--or with
Captain Lescault or Captain Forraker or with “1582” (as she called
to herself the Sussex officer and once came near calling him that
aloud), when she would come around the corner of a cabin and almost
run into Agnes Ertyle and Gerry Hull going about the deck in the
other direction; or she would pass them, seated close together and
with Lady Agnes all bundled up in steamer rugs, and Ruth would see
them suddenly stop talking when she and her escort came close, and
they would look away at the sea as though they had been just looking
at the water all the time.

He would sit down beside Ruth, too; and he would take her around and
around the deck, tramping glowing, spray-splattered miles with him.
They talked a lot; but now they never really said anything to each
other. And it seemed to Ruth that each throb of those ceaseless
engines, which thrust them ever nearer and nearer to France, made
what she felt and believed more outrageous to him.

One afternoon, when the wireless happened to be tuned to catch the
wavelength of messages sweeping over the seas from some powerful
sending station in Germany, they picked up the enemy’s boasts for
the day; and among them was the announcement that the famous
American “ace,” sergeant pilot Paul Crosby, had been shot down and
killed by a German flyer on the Lorraine front. It chanced that
Gerry Hull and Agnes Ertyle were in the main saloon near where Ruth
also was when some busybody, who had heard this news, brought it to
Gerry Hull and asked him if he had known Paul Crosby.

Ruth knew that Gerry Hull and Paul Crosby had joined the French
flying forces together; they had flown in the same escadrille for
more than a year. She did not turn about, as others were doing, to
watch Gerry Hull when he got this news; but she could not help
hearing his simple and quiet reply, which brought tears to her eyes
as no sob or protestation of grief could; and she could not help
seeing him as he passed before her on his way out alone to the deck.

She dreamed that night about being torpedoed; in the dream, the boat
was the _Ribot_; and upon the vessel there were--as almost always
there are in dreams--a perfectly impossible company. Besides those
who actually were on board, there were Sam Hilton and Lieutenant
George Byrne and “Aunt Emilie” and Aunt Cynthia Gifford Grange and
the woman in gray and a great many others--so many, indeed, that
there were not boats enough on the _Ribot_ to take off all the
company as the ship sank. So Gerry Hull, after putting Lady Agnes in
a boat and kissing her good-bye, himself stepped back to go down
with the ship; and so, when all the boats were gone, he found Ruth
beside him; for she had known that he would not try to save himself
and she had hidden to stay with him. His arms were about her as the
water rose to them and--she awoke.

Their U-boat really came; but with results disconcertingly
different. January, 1918--if you can remember clearly back to days
so strange and distant--was a month when America was sending across
men by tens rather than by hundreds of thousands and convoying them
very, very carefully; there were not so many destroyers as soon
there were; the U-boats had not yet raided far out into the
Atlantic--so fast and well-armed ships like the _Ribot_, which were
not transports, were allowed to proceed a certain part of the way
across unconvoyed, keeping merely to certain “lanes” on courses
prescribed by wireless.

The _Ribot_, Ruth knew, was on one of these lanes and soon would be
“picked up” by the destroyers and shepherded by them into a convoy
for passage through the zone of greatest danger. In fact, Ruth and
Milicent Wetherell, who also had awakened early upon this particular
morning, were looking out of their port over a gray and misty sea to
discover whether they might have been picked up during the night and
now were in a convoy. But they saw no sign of any other vessel,
though the mist, which was patchy and floating low, let them look a
mile or more away. There was no smoke in sight--nothing but gray
clouds and the frayed fog and the sea swelling oilily up and
slipping down against the side of the ship.

Then, about a hundred yards away from the side and rather far
forward, a spout of spray squirted suddenly straight up into the
air. It showered over toward the ship and splashed down.

“That’s a shot,” Ruth said, “at us.”

“Where’s the U-boat?” Milicent asked her; and they both pressed
closer to the port to look out. They had heard no sound of the gun,
or they did not distinguish it from the noises of the ship. Ruth was
shaking with excitement; she could feel Milicent shaking too.
Another spout of spray, still forward but a good deal closer,
spurted up; and this time they heard--or thought they heard--the
sound of the gun which had fired that shell at them. The roar of
their own guns--one forward and one aft--buffeted them violently.

“We’re fighting!” Ruth cried.

“Can you see anything?” Milicent demanded.

“Not a thing. Let’s get dressed!”

Gongs were beating throughout the ship; and the guns on deck were
going, “_Twumm! twumm! twumm!_” Ruth could hear, in the intervals,
the voices of stewards calling to passengers in the companionways
between the cabins. A tremendous shock, stifling and deafening,
hurled Ruth against the bunk; hurled Milicent upon her. They clung
together, coughing and gasping for breath.

“Hit us!” Ruth said; she might have shouted; she might have
whispered; she did not know which.

“That’s just powder fumes; not gas,” Milicent made herself
understood.

“No; not _nauge de gaz_,” Ruth agreed. They were hearing each other
quite normally; and they laughed at each other--at the French lesson
phrase, rather. They had learned the phrases together, drilled each
other and taken the lessons so seriously; and the lessons seemed so
silly now.

“They must have hurt someone,” Ruth said. For the first time she
consciously thought of Gerry Hull; probably subconsciously she had
been thinking of him all the time. “He wasn’t hit,” she was saying
to herself confidently now. “That shell struck us forward; his
cabin’s aft and on the other side; so he couldn’t have been
hurt--unless he’d come to this side to get Lady Agnes.”

Another shell exploded in the ship--aft somewhere and lower. It
didn’t knock Ruth down or stifle her with fumes as the other had.
Someone was beating at her door and she opened it--Milicent and she
had got into their clothes. Ruth saw Hubert Lennon in the passage.

“You’re safe!” he cried out to her with mighty relief. He had pulled
trousers and coat over his pajamas; he had shoes, unlaced, upon his
bare feet. He was without his glasses and his nearsighted eyes
blinked big and blankly; he had on a life-jacket, of the sort under
all berths; but he bore in his hands a complete life-suit with big
boots into which one stepped and which had a bag top to go up about
the neck.

“Put this on!” he thrust it at Ruth.

“We’re not sinking,” she replied. “Oh, thank you; thank you--but we
aren’t torpedoed--not yet. They’re just firing and we’re fighting--”
indeed she was shouting to be heard after the noise of their
guns--“we must have people hurt.”

“We’ve a lot--a lot hurt,” Hubert said.

Other shells were striking the ship; and Ruth went by him into a
passage confused with smoke and stumbly from things strewn under her
feet; a cabin door hung open and beyond the door, the side of the
ship gaped suddenly to the sea. The sides of the gap were jagged and
split and splintered wood; a ripped mattress, bedding, a man’s coat
and shirt, a woman’s clothing lay strewn all about; the bedding
smouldered and from under it a hand projected--a man’s hand. It
clasped and opened convulsively; Ruth stopped and grasped the hand;
it caught hers very tight and, still holding and held by it, Ruth
with her other hand cleared the bedding from off the man’s face. She
recognized him at once; he was an oldish, gentle but fearless little
man--an American who had been a missionary in Turkey; he and his
wife, who had worked with him, had been to America to raise money
for Armenian relief and had been on their way back together to their
perilous post.

“Mattie?” the little man was asking anxiously of Ruth as he looked
up at her. “Mattie?”

Mattie, Ruth knew, must have been his wife; and she turned back the
bedding beyond him.

“She’s gone,” Ruth told him, mercifully thrusting him back as he
tried to turn about. “She’s gone where you are going.”

The little missionary’s eyes closed. “The order for all moneys is in
my pocket. Luke VI, 27,” his lips murmured. “Luke VI, 27 and 35.”

The hand which again was holding Ruth’s and which had been so strong
the instant before, was quiet now. “The sixth chapter of the gospel
according to St. Luke and the twenty-seventh verse,” the little
man’s voice murmured, “But I say unto you which hear, Love your
enemies.”

Ruth covered his face decently with the sheet; and, rising, she
grasped the jagged edges of the hole blown by the German shell in
the side of the ship; and she stared out it. A mile and a half away;
two miles or more perhaps--she could not tell--but at any rate just
where the fringe of the mist stopped sight, she saw a long, low
shape scudding over the swell of the sea; puffs of haze of a
different quality hung over it, cleared and hung again. Ruth
understood that these were the gases from guns firing--the guns
which had sent that shell which had slain in their beds the little
Armenian missionary and his wife, the guns which were sending the
shells now bursting aboard the _Ribot_ further below and more
astern. Ruth gazed at the U-boat aghast with fury--fury and loathing
beyond any feeling which she could have imagined. She had supposed
she had known full loathing when she learned of the first deeds done
in Termonde and Louvain; then she had thought, when the Germans sank
the _Lusitania_, that it was utterly impossible for her to detest
fellow-men more than those responsible. But now she knew that any
passion previously stirred within her was only the weak and vacuous
reaction to a tale which was told. She had viewed her first dead
slain by a fellow-man; and amazing, all overwhelming instincts--an
urge to kill, kill in return, kill in punishment, kill in
revenge--possessed her. She had not meant to kill before. She had
thought of saving life--saving the Belgians from more barbarities,
saving the lives of those at sea; she had thought of her task ahead,
and of the risks she was to run, as saving the lives of American and
British and French soldiers. For the first time she thought of
herself as an instrument to kill--kill Germans, many, many Germans;
all that she could.

Someone had come into the wreck of that cabin behind her now. A
steward, probably; or perhaps Hubert Lennon, who had found her
again. She did not turn but continued to stare at the U-boat, her
hands clinging to the jagged hole made by its shell. A man’s hand
caught her shoulder and a voice spoke to her--Gerry Hull’s voice.

“Come with me,” he was saying to her. “You cannot stay here; come to
a safer place.”

“A safer place!” she repeated to him. “How can we help to kill them
on that boat?” she cried to him.

He was undoing her fingers, by main strength, from their clutch at
the jagged iron of the shell hole. He was very calm and quiet and
strong; and he was controlling her as though she were a child.

“They’re four thousand yards off,” he said to her. “That one there
and another on the other side. It’s just begun to fire.”

Some of the shells which had been striking, Ruth realized now, had
burst on the other side of the _Ribot_.

“Yes,” she said.

“We’ve signaled we’re attacked,” he told her. He had both her hands
free; and he bound her arms to her body with his arms. “We’ve an
answer, and destroyers are coming. But they can’t get up before an
hour or two; so we’ve a long fight on. You must come below.”

He was half carrying her, ignominiously; and it came to Ruth that,
before seeking her, he had gone to Agnes Ertyle; but she had not
delayed him because she was used to being under fire, used to seeing
those slain by fellow-men; used to knowing what she could and could
not do.

“I’ll go where--I should,” Ruth promised, looking up at him; and he
released her.

He pointed her toward a companionway where steps had led downward a
few minutes before; but now they were broken and smoke at that
moment was beginning to pour up. He turned and led her off to the
right; but a shell struck before them there and hurled them back
with the shock of its detonation. It skewed around a sheet of steel
which had been a partition wall between two cabins; it blew down
doors and strewed débris of all sorts down upon them. Another shell,
striking aft, choked and closed escape in the other direction. Gerry
Hull threw himself against the sheet of thin steel which the shell
so swiftly and easily had spread over the passage; but all his
strength could not budge it. He turned back to Ruth and looked her
over.

“All right?” he asked her.

“You are too?”

He turned from her and gazed through the side of the ship. “They’ve
got our range pretty well, I should say. They’re still firing both
their guns, and we don’t seem to be hitting much.”

He tried again to bend back the sheet of steel which penned them in
the passage, but with effort as vain as before.

“I guess we stay here for a while,” he said when he desisted. “If we
don’t get help and it looks like we’re going to sink, we can always
dive through there into the sea.”

A shell smashed in below and a few rods forward and burst with
terrific detonation.

“Huns seem to like this part of the ship,” he said when the shock
was past.

“That started something burning just below,” Ruth said.

Throughout the ship again, between the concussion of the striking
shells and the firing of the _Ribot’s_ guns, alarm gongs were going.

A woman screamed; men’s shouts came in answer. The rush of the
_Ribot_ through the water, which had been swift and steady since the
start of the fight, suddenly swerved and the ship veered off to the
right.

“What’s that?” Ruth said.

“We may be zigzagging to dodge torpedoes,” Gerry Hull said. “Or it
may be that our helm is shot away and we can’t steer; or we may be
changing course to charge a sub in close.”

A detonation closer than any before quite stunned Ruth for seconds
or minutes or longer--she did not know. Only when she came to
herself slowly, she was alone behind the sheet of steel. Gerry Hull
was gone.




CHAPTER VII: “ONE OF OUR OWN!”


The deck floor just beyond her, where he had been, was gone; or
rather--as she saw now through the smoke--it slanted steeply down
like a chute into a chasm of indefinite depth from which the heavy,
stifling smoke was pouring. A draft sucked the smoke out of the
shattered side of the ship over the sea and gave Ruth cleaner air to
breathe for seconds at a time. Gerry Hull must have been hurled into
that chasm when that last detonation blew away the floor; or else he
must have flung himself into the sea.

Ruth called his name, shouting first into the smoke column and then,
creeping down to the shell hole in the side, she thrust her head out
and gazed at the sea. Wreckage from the upper deck--wooden chairs,
bits of canvas--swept backwards; she saw no one swimming. The splash
of the waves dashed upon her, the ship was rushing onward, but not
so swiftly as before, and with a distinct change in the thrust of
the engines and with a strange sensation of strain on the ship. Only
one engine was going, Ruth decided--the port engine; it was being
forced faster and faster to do the work of both and the rudder was
pulled against the swerve of the port screw to keep the vessel from
swinging in a circle.

The guns on deck were firing steadily, it seemed; but the German
submarine, which Ruth could see and which had begun to drop behind
when the _Ribot_ was racing with both engines, was drawing up
abreast again with both its big rifles firing. But the _Ribot’s_
guns, if they had not yet hit that U-boat, at least had driven her
away; for, though she came up abreast, the German kept farther off
than before; and while Ruth watched, she heard a sudden, wild cheer
from the deck; French shells had gone home somewhere on that U-boat
or upon the other which Ruth could not see.

Smoke continued to sweep by Ruth, engulfing her for long moments,
but the fire was far enough below not to immediately threaten her.
So for the minute she was as safe as she could be anywhere upon that
long flank of the ship at which the U-boats were firing. At any
instant, a shell might obliterate her; but she could not influence
that by any thought or action of her own. So she thought no more
about it. She could possibly influence the fate of Gerry Hull. He
had been flung down that chute of the deck floor, she thought; the
shell might have killed him; it might only have wounded or stunned
him. In that case, he must be lying helpless down there where the
flames were. She took long breaths of sea air and crept back and
called again into the smoke; she thought she heard a man’s cry in
response; Gerry Hull’s voice. She returned to the hole in the side
of the ship and let the waves drench her face and her hair; she
caught up her skirt and soaked it in the splash of the sea.

The firing of the guns was keeping up all this time; the shock of
shells bursting aboard the ship also continued. But the tug and
thrust of the single engine had stopped; the vessel vibrated only at
the firing of its own guns or at the detonation of a German shell.

Ruth took a towel which she found at her hand--she was in the wreck
of someone’s cabin--and, after soaking it, she bound it about her
head and crept back through the smoke to where the steel chute of
the floor slanted sheer.

She dropped and fell upon a heap of sharp, shattered things which
cut her ankles and stumbled her over on hands and knees upon débris,
not flaming itself, but warm from a fire which burned lower. She
lifted the towel from her eyes to try to see; but the smoke blinded
her; she could not breathe; and she bound the towel again and
crawled off the heap of smoldering things upon a linoleum. She heard
a moan; but she could not find anyone in the smoke, though she
called thickly several times. A current of air was sweeping over the
floor and, following it, she came to a huge rent in the ship’s side
where water washed in and out as the vessel rolled. The water had
ceased to move from bow to stern; the vessel was merely drifting. A
man floated, face downward, upon a wave which washed him almost to
the ship’s side. Ruth reached out to seize him; she touched his
shoulder--a blue-clad shoulder, the uniform of the French; but she
could get no hold; the sea drew him slowly away.

“Gerry Hull! Gerry!” she called, as though that form in the French
coat, with head under the water, could hear. The next wash brought
it back toward the ship; but also drifted it farther to the stern.
Now Ruth found among the rubbish washing at her feet a floating
thing--a lifejacket. She thrust her arms in it and when the waves
washed that blue-clad form nearer the next time, she leaped into the
sea and swam toward it and got grasp of a sleeve and struggled back
toward the ship.

The vessel’s side towered above her, mighty and menacing; it swung
away from her, showing a long steep slant to the gray sky; it swung
back and tilted over as though to crush her; wreckage slipped from
off its topmost tier and splashed into the sea beside her. She could
see the cloud of gun gases puff out and clear; then the flash of
firing again. All the time she was thrashing with one arm to swim in
the wash beside the vessel and drag the blue-clad form. That form
was heavier now; and, as her clutch numbed, it slipped from her and
sank. She spun about and tried to dive, groping with her hands below
the surface; but the form was gone.

“Gerry Hull!” she cried out. “I had Gerry Hull--here!”

A coil of rope struck the water near her; men yelled to her to seize
it; but she groped below the water until, exhausted from the cold,
she looped the rope about her and they pulled her up.

“Lieutenant Gerry Hull was in the water there,” she cried to them
who took her in their arms. “Lieutenant Gerry Hull is”--she shouted
to the next man who took her when, looking up, she saw his face.

Silence--a marvelous stilling of the guns which had been resounding
from fore and aft; a miraculous stopping of the frightful shock of
the shells which had been bursting in the ship--enveloped Ruth. She
did not know at first whether it was because some of her senses were
gone; she could see Gerry Hull’s face, feel his arms holding her and
the rhythm of his body as he stepped, carrying her; she could hear
his voice and the voices of others close by; but all other sound and
reverberation had ceased.

“I was separated from you,” Gerry Hull was explaining to her. “I was
coming back to try and get you out.”

“I went down the way you fell,” she replied to him. “Then I saw a
man in the sea. I thought he was you. I tried to get him.”

She was silent for a few moments while he carried her; the miracle
of stillness continued; but it was a great effort for her to speak.

“I would have done it for anyone.”

“I know you would,” he said to her.

“You’ve seen Hubert?” she asked.

“He’s not among the hurt,” Gerry answered.

She was quite certain now that the stillness had continued so long
that it could not be merely the interval between firing or between
the arrival of German shells.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“What is what, Cynthia Gail?”

He called her whole name, as he knew it, as she had been calling
his. “We’re not fighting,” she said. “We haven’t surrendered or--are
we sinking?”

“A destroyer’s come in sight,” he said. “It’s fighting one of the
Huns. Listen!” He halted for an instant to let her hear the distant
sound of guns.

“I hear it,” she said.

“We hit that U-boat, we think, so that it can’t submerge and has to
keep fighting on the surface. The other’s submerged.”

He brought her down a stairway into some large compartment,
evidently below the water line; it seemed to have been a dining
saloon for the steerage when the _Ribot_ had been regularly in the
passenger trade; or perhaps it had been crews’ quarters. Now it was
a hospital; cots had been laid out and those who had been injured by
the shell fire had been brought there. They were a great many, it
seemed to Ruth--thirty or forty. She had never seen so many
suffering people, so many bandages, so much blood before. The ship’s
surgeon was moving among them; women were there--quiet, calm,
competent women. One had direction of the others and Ruth gazed at
her for moments before she recognized Agnes Ertyle with her
beautiful, sweet eyes become maturely stern and, at the same time,
marvelously compassionate. If Ruth were a man, she must love that
girl, she thought; love her now as never before. Ruth looked up to
Gerry Hull to see his face when he spoke to Lady Agnes; he evidently
witnessed no new marvel in her. He had seen her like this before,
undoubtedly; that was why he loved her.

“I’m not hurt,” Ruth said, ashamed of herself for having been
brought to this place among so many who had been terribly wounded.
“I’ve just been in the water; I’m wet, that’s all.” She moved to
release herself from Gerry’s hold.

“She went into the sea to save a man,” Gerry told Agnes Ertyle.

“Let me go to the cabin,” Ruth said, as she stood a little dizzily.

Lady Agnes grasped her hand. “If your cabin’s been wrecked, go to
mine--number twenty-six--and take any of my things,” she invited.
“Get dry and warm at once.”

She motioned to someone who gave Ruth hot, strong tea to drink.
Gerry turned with Ruth and led her up the stairs down which he had
just carried her; he saw her to the door of her cabin, which had not
been wrecked; he saw that a stewardess was there to aid her. Then he
went.

The stewardess helped Ruth undress and rubbed her and put on warm
and heavy things. Milicent Wetherell came to the cabin; she had
escaped uninjured, and she aided also.

The rifles on the _Ribot’s_ deck rang out suddenly; they fired
twice; again twice; and were still. Ruth had on warm, dry clothes
now; and she ran out with Milicent Wetherell to the deck. While the
_Ribot_ had been under shell fire, passengers had been kept from the
decks; but now that the sole danger was from torpedoes, the decks
had become the safest place.

The gun crews had seen--Ruth was told--what they thought was a
periscope and had fired. There was nothing in sight now near the
_Ribot_ but the wreckage which had fallen during the fight. Far off
to the right, the U-boat which had continued to run on the surface,
had withdrawn beyond the range of the _Ribot’s_ guns and was fleeing
away to the south, fighting as it fled. The morning light had quite
cleared the mist from the surface of the ocean and Ruth could see
the low line of the German boat obscuring itself with gun-gases as
its rifles fired. But its shells no longer burst aboard the
passenger vessel or spurted up spray from the sea alongside. Far,
far to the east and north appeared a speck--a gray, sea-colored
speck, sheathing itself in the sparkling white of foam every second
or so, casting the sheath of seaspray aside and rushing on gray and
dun again--the bow of the destroyer coming up. She was coming up
very fast--with a marvelous, leaping swiftness which sent the blood
tingling through Ruth.

The destroyer seemed hurled through the water, so fast she came; it
seemed impossible that engines, turning screws, could send a ship on
as that vessel dashed; she seemed to advance hundreds of yards at a
leap, hurling the spray high before her and screened by it for a
flash; and when she thrust through the foam and cut clear away from
it, she was larger and clearer and nearer. And, as she came, she
fought. Her guns were going--one, two, three of them! Ruth could see
the gossamer of their gases as they puffed forward and were swept
backward; she could hear on the wind the resound of the quick
firers. Steadily, rhythmically, relentlessly they rang, beating over
the sea like great bells booming in vengeance for the _Ribot’s_
dead.

Ruth felt lifted up, glorified as by nothing she had ever known
before. She turned to the man who had come up beside her; he was
Gerry Hull and, as he looked over the sea at the destroyer, she saw
the blood burning red, paling, and burning bright again in his face.

“What ship is that?” Ruth cried to him. “Do you know whether it’s
English or French or our own?”

“It’s the _Starke_!” Gerry Hull replied. “The _U. S. S. Starke_, she
reported herself to us! She made thirty-one knots the hour on her
builder’s trial two years ago; but she promised us to make the forty
miles to us in an hour and ten minutes! And she’s beating that, if I
know speed. God,” he appealed in reverent wonder, “look at her
come!”

“The _United States Ship Starke_!” Ruth cried. “One of our own!”

A wild, wanton, incredible phrase ran through her; “the shame of
being an American.” And, as she recalled it, she saw that Gerry Hull
recollected it too; and the hot color on his cheeks deepened and his
eyes, when they met hers, looked quickly away.

“They’re wonderful, those fellows,” he admitted to her aloud. He
spoke, then, not to her, but to the destroyer. “But why couldn’t you
come three years ago?”

A cry rose simultaneously from a lookout forward upon the _Ribot_
and from another man in the top. A periscope had appeared; and the
guns at once were going again at it. The radio, in the cabin
amidships, was snapping a warning to the _Starke_. The _Ribot’s_
guns and the splash of their shells into the sea gave the direction
to Ruth and to Gerry Hull; and they saw, for a flash, a spar moving
just above the water and hurling a froth before it, trailing a wake
behind. Indeed, it was probably only the froth and the wake which
they made out at all certainly; but that was discernible; and it
moved, not toward them, but aslant to them and pointed toward the
course of the American destroyer as it came up.

“They’re trying to get the _Starke_!” Gerry Hull interpreted this to
Ruth. “The Huns are leaving us for later; they know they’ve got to
get the _Starke_ or the _Starke_ will get their other boat.”

“The _Starke_ saw them!” Ruth cried, as the guns on the destroyer,
which had been firing at the fleeing U-boat to the south, tore up
the sea where the _Ribot’s_ shells were splashing.

“The torpedo’s started by this time,” Gerry Hull said. “Two of ’em,
probably, if the Huns had two left.”

Others about Ruth on the deck of the _Ribot_ realized that; and the
commander of the _Starke_ recognized it too. Ruth saw the leaping
form of the destroyer veer suddenly and point straight at the spot
in the sea where the U-boat had thrust up its periscope. This
presented the narrow beam of the destroyer, instead of its length,
for the torpedo’s target; but still Ruth held breath as on the
_Starke_ came.

Gerry Hull had thrust his wrist from his sleeve and, as they stood
waiting, he glanced down again and again to his watch.
“Passing--past!” he muttered to himself while he counted the time.
“The torpedoes have missed,” he announced positively to Ruth at
last.

The commander of the _Starke_ evidently thought so too; for the
length of his boat began to show again. His guns had ceased firing;
and the _Ribot’s_ rifles also were silent. The destroyer, veering
still farther to the right, was dashing now almost at right angles
to its former course.

“They’re going to cross the course of the Hun,” Gerry Hull explained
this also to Ruth, “and give ’em an ‘ashcan,’ I suppose--a depth
charge, you know,” he added.

“I know,” Ruth said. She had read, at least, of the tremendous
bombs, filled with the new explosive “T. N. T.,” which the U-boat
hunters carried and which they dropped with fuse fixed to burst far
below the surface. One of these bombs, in size and shape near enough
to “ashcans” to win the nickname, was powerful enough--she knew--to
wreck an undersea craft if the charge burst close by.

The _Starke_ was still leaping on with its length showing to the
_Ribot_ when two hundred yards or more astern the destroyer, a great
geyser of water leaped into the air fifty--a hundred feet; and while
the column of water still seemed to mushroom up and up, a tremendous
shock battered the _Ribot_.

Someone shouted out in French while another called in English,
“Depth charge dropped from the destroyer!”

“There was one ‘ashcan,’” Gerry Hull murmured. “Now for another!”

For the _Starke_, as soon as the charge had detonated, had put her
helm about and was circling back with marvelous swiftness to cross
again the spot in the sea where she had dropped the great bomb.

Men were below that spot of sea, Ruth knew--German men, fifty or
eighty or a hundred of them, perhaps. They were young men, mostly,
not unlike--in their physical appearance, at least--German-born boys
whom she had known at home in Onarga or in Chicago. Some of that
crew might, conceivably, even be cousins of those boys. They had
mothers and sisters in homes at Hamburg or Dresden or Munich or
perhaps in that delightful toy town of Nuremberg, which she knew and
had loved from pictures and stories; or some of them came, perhaps,
from the Black Forest--from those quaint, lovely homely woodland
cottages which Howard Pyle and Grimm had taught her to love when she
was a child. They were helpless down there below the sea at this
moment, perhaps, with the seams of their boat opened by that
tremendous shock which had battered even the _Ribot_ so far away;
water might be coming in upon them, suffocating them, drowning them
there like rats in a trap. The vision flowed before Ruth’s eyes for
an instant with horror; then she saw them, not choking and fighting
each other for escape which none could find, but crouching safe and
smiling in their boat, stealing away swiftly and undamaged to wait
chance to rise again to try another torpedo at the _Starke_ or to
surprise with gunfire, at the next dawn, another vessel like the
_Ribot_ and murder more people in their beds and fill the space
below decks with the dead and the agonized dying.

“Get ’em!” Gerry Hull, close beside her, was praying. “Oh, get ’em
now! Get ’em!”

No reaction to weakness had come to him; years ago, he had passed
beyond that; and Ruth, at once, had recovered.

“Get ’em!” Aloud, without being conscious of it, she echoed his
ejaculation; and astern of the _Starke_, as the few minutes before,
another great geyser of seawater arose; another titanic blow,
disseminating through the water, beat upon the _Ribot_. The _Starke_
was turning about short, again; but when she rushed back over her
wake, this time she dropped no other depth charge; she slowed a
little instead, and circled while she examined carefully the surface
of the sea. Then suddenly she straightened her course away to the
south; she buried her bow in a wave; with the rush of her
propellers, foam churned at her stern; she was at full speed after
the U-boat which she first had engaged and which, during this
interlude, had run quite out of sight to the south or had sunk or
submerged. While she pursued, her radio was reporting to the
_Ribot_; and the _Ribot’s_ rasped in return.

Oil in convincing quantities had come to the surface where the
_Starke_ had dropped its charge. Of course, the Germans often pumped
oil out of their U-boats, when no damage had been done, for the
purpose of deceiving the hunters and making them think they had
destroyed a U-boat when they had not. But the officers of the
_Starke_ had been satisfied with their findings; they would follow
up the other U-boat and then return. They understood that only two
U-boats had appeared to the _Ribot_; if another came or if either of
the two reappeared, the _Starke_ would return instantly.

No third enemy came; and neither of the others reappeared. In fact,
the _Starke_ failed to find any further trace of the U-boat which,
for a time, had fought upon the surface and then run away. Either
the gunfire of the _Ribot_ or of the _Starke_ had so damaged it that
it suddenly sank, leaving no survivors; or--as the men aboard the
_Ribot_ seemed to think was more likely--the crew succeeded in
repairing the damage done so that it was able to submerge and
escape. In this case, it might venture another attack, by torpedo,
upon the drifting _Ribot_; so the _Starke_, after abandoning the
search, put herself beside the _Ribot_. An American officer came
aboard, bringing with him a surgeon to aid in care of the _Ribot’s_
wounded; he brought also mechanics to assist the engine crew of the
_Ribot_ in repairs and he supplied, from his own crew, men to take
the places of the _Ribot’s_ crew who had been killed.

Ruth watched the young lieutenant--he was few years older than Gerry
Hull or herself--as he went about his business with the officers of
the _Ribot_. If any shame for recreancy of his country had ever
stirred him, it had left no mark; he was confident and
competent--not proud but quite sure of himself and of his service.
She looked for Gerry Hull to see whether he observed this one of
their people; she looked to see whether Captain Forraker and “1582”
also saw him. And she found that “1582” was the first to make
opportunity to meet the American officer and compliment him.

“You chaps might have been blowing up U-boats for a thousand years!”

The pounding and hammering in the engine rooms was resulting in
thrust again from the port engine. The _Ribot_ started under steam
and ran through an area of water all iridescent with floating oil.
Bits of wood and cloth scraps floated in the oil--bits which men
scooped up to preserve for proof that the depth charges, which the
_Starke_ had dropped there, had burst and destroyed a German
submarine.

Gerry Hull had gone below to look into the hospital again. Ruth had
offered to aid there but, having no experience, she was not
accepted. So Hubert Lennon found her on deck and went to the rail
with her while they watched the recovery of these relics from the
sea. It had been his first experience, as well as hers, with the
frightful mercilessness of modern battle; he had been made sick--a
little--by what he had seen. He could not conceal it; his sensitive,
weak eyes were big; he was very pale; his hand was unsteady as he
lit a cigarette.

“Queer--isn’t it?--queer that they should want to do what they’ve
done below and we have no feeling at all about them.” He was gazing
down at the oil, shimmering all colors of the rainbow as the waves
flickered it against the light.

“You’ve none at all?” Ruth asked, looking up at him.

“I had none at the time we were after them; but I’m afraid,” he
confessed with that honesty which Ruth had learned to expect from
him, “the idea of them gets to me now. Not that I wouldn’t kill them
all again! Oh, I’d kill! I’ve dreamt sometimes of being surrounded
by ’em and having a machine gun and mowing Germans down--mowing ’em
down till there wasn’t one left. But it always seemed such an
inadequate thing to do. It ought to be possible to do more--I don’t
mean torture them physically, of course; but to make them innocuous
somehow and let them live and think about what they’ve done. There
couldn’t be anything more terrible than that.”

“We’ve succeeded in doing that sometimes,” Ruth said. “We’ve taken
prisoners even from their U-boats; but they don’t seem to be
troubled much with remorse. It would be different for you and for
men like you; but that’s because you couldn’t do what they’ve done.”

“Sometimes I feel that I could to them. So I guess it’s a good thing
I’m going to be an ambulance driver. To fight them and keep fighting
fair and clean yourself--well it must take more stuff than I’ve
got.”

Ruth did not know quite what to make of this confession. Constantly,
since that first day when he called for her at the hotel in Chicago,
he had been paying his peculiar sort of court to her--peculiar,
particularly, in that he never obtruded himself when anyone else
offered and he never failed to admit anything against himself.

“It was fine of you, Hubert,” she said, “to come right for me when
the fight began.”

“I thought we were sinking; that’s how much sense I had,” he
returned. “Gerry, now, knew just what to do.”

“He didn’t come for me first, Hubert.”

“Maybe not; but you wished he had; I’m glad,” he went on quickly
before she could rejoin, “that this has taught Gerry a few things.”

It was evident from his manner that he meant “things” in relation to
her; and that puzzled her, for she could not feel any alteration in
Gerry Hull’s manner at all. To be sure, she had gone into the sea to
try to rescue one whom she thought was he; Gerry Hull knew this. But
that was not the sort of thing which could undo the opposition
between them. Yet it was plain, upon succeeding days, that Hubert
had discerned a fact; she had become again a person of real concern
to Gerry Hull.

She dated the start of that rehabilitation of herself not with her
adventure in the sea or with the moment when he carried her in his
arms; but with that instant when they stood together watching the
_U. S. S. Starke_ come up. That rehabilitation proceeded fast the
next days when, after the _Ribot_ had repaired both engines, the
_Starke_ brought the ship into a convoy--a fleet of some thirty
merchant vessels of all sorts and under a dozen flags, belligerent
and neutral, guarded and directed by a flotilla of American
destroyers, with the senior American officer in command of all the
convoy.

British trawlers joined them soon, adding their protection; two of
the destroyers sent up balloons which they towed; and now, by day,
British and French dirigible balloons and British and French and,
yes, American seaplane pilots appeared. And no submarine, in those
waters supposed to be infested with U-boats, once showed a
periscope. By day and night, the patrol and protection of those
American destroyers proved perfect. So by that protection they came
at last to France.

Gerry sought out Ruth upon the last morning when they would be on
shipboard. It was a smiling, sunny day, warm for that time in the
year. In addition to the ships of the sea and air which recently had
accompanied them constantly, strange little business-like boats
approached, airplanes from the land spied upon them; and as they
drew near to the port, Ruth got amazing sight of the multifold
activities of even this still distant threshold to war.

“You’re going to Paris right away?” Gerry asked.

“As soon as I can get through.”

“We’ll get a train that’ll probably bring us in at night. If you’ve
not made arrangements ahead----”

“I have, thanks; rather Hubert’s offered to see to me; besides his
aunt gave me letters to cousins of hers who’ve been living in Paris
for years. They’re Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Mayhew; they’ve an apartment
on the Avenue Kléber. I’m to go there my first night anyway.”

“That’s good. I’ve heard of the Mayhews; they’ve done a lot all
during the war. Then can I look you up at the Mayhews’ when I’m in
Paris? I hope for service right away, of course; but Paris is close
for our leave always.”

“Oh, I’ll not stay at the Mayhews’ or on Avenue Kléber! I’m to find
a room with Milicent Wetherell.”

“So you’ll carry out your Latin Quarter plan! That’s better! But
you’ll leave the address, anyway, at the Mayhews’?”

“Yes,” Ruth promised.

She took the opportunity to ask him many practical, matter-of-fact
items which she needed to know--particularly about the examinations
to be made upon arrival in France.

“My passport’s almost ruined, you see,” she explained to him.

“Why? What’s happened?”

Ruth colored. “I always carried it with me; so it got soaked in the
sea the other day.”

Color came to his face too; that had happened when she went into the
water to get him, of course. She would not have reminded him of it
but that she knew she well might need help no less influential than
his to pass the gateway to France.

“Of course,” he said. “How’s it spoiled?”

“My picture on it, mostly.”

“Oh; that’ll be all right! You’ll just have to have another picture
taken in France and have them paste it on. I’ll tell ’em about it
and see you through, of course.”

Accordingly Ruth went to her cabin and, after bolting the door
against even Milicent Wetherell, she got out her passport which
really had been wet by the sea but not soaked so badly that the
picture was useless. Indeed, the picture was still plain enough so
that a French intelligence officer might make out that it was not
Ruth. So she soaked it again in water until that danger was past;
then she dried it and took it with her to present at the port.

“I’ve told Agnes Ertyle all about your passport,” Gerry Hull said to
her when she came on deck again, “so she’ll help you out if they put
the women through first. They have to be awfully careful in France
these days about spies, you see--especially now--spies from
America.”




CHAPTER VIII: FRANCE


Fear--so Ruth was finding out--is a most complicated and perplexing
sensation. What she had learned about fear, upon those infrequent
occasions when causes of alarm approached that queer, humdrum,
almost forgotten girl who used to work for Sam Hilton, had made it
appear a simple emotion to bring about a rational reaction. One fear
differed from another chiefly in degrees of effect; you might be a
little afraid of something--like having your skirt caught in an
elevator door when the car started up too crowded; having a rough
looking man suddenly accost you when you were hurrying back to
Ontario Street late in a winter evening, caused more alarm; and
there were other occurrences which had frightened still more. The
amount of fear you felt--and the force of the corresponding
reaction--seemed generally proportional to the danger threatening
you; but now Ruth had been through an adventure--battle--which had
menaced her life to a far greater degree than any previous
experience; and she had not been afraid, in the old sense of fear.
Emotions had tortured her--emotions far more violent and furious
than ever she had suffered; but fear for her life had not been chief
among them. Committed to battle, as she had been by the mere fact of
her presence aboard the _Ribot_, the instant realization that
nothing she could do could save her had amazingly freed her from
fear.

Fear, then, was not made up just of a dread of death. Now that the
_Ribot_ was safely in from the Bay of Biscay, had passed the Phare
de Cordouan and was running down the broad, flat estuary of the
Gironde river to Bordeaux, securely situated sixty long miles
inland, Ruth was in no danger of death at all. If at that city,
whose roofs and chimneys were just coming into sight, the French
examiners found out how she had obtained her passport, how she had
duped and tricked people to aid her in arriving here, and if they
arrested her, therefore, upon the charge of being a German spy, they
would be making her life safe; her punishment probably would not go
beyond imprisonment for the duration of the war; it would prevent
her wild plan of going into Germany, where court-martials did not
simply imprison spies. Yet Ruth was afraid this morning as she had
never been before; far, far more afraid than when she had been in
battle.

That meant, obviously, that she was far more afraid of failing to do
that which she was determined upon than she was afraid of dying.
Less than three weeks earlier, when Ruth Alden was drawing up
quit-claims and deeds for Sam Hilton in Chicago, such a recognition
of the fact in regard to oneself would have seemed--even if spoken
only to self--ostentatious and theatrical; but now to make the fate
of yourself nothing, the performing of your part in the great scheme
everything, was the simple and accepted code of almost everyone
about her.

Exactly when Ruth had begun to accept this code for herself, she did
not know. Once or twice in her twenty-two years she had encountered
emergencies when one person or two--or very, very few, at
most--acted without regard to consequence to themselves; but always
they did this for the saving of more serious catastrophe to a
greater number of persons who were present; so that even upon those
occasions the highest purpose was plain self-preservation. But now
Ruth had become a member of a society not chiefly charged with
preserving itself--whose spirit, indeed, was disregard of self. She
had come from a society in which the discovery that a certain
project was not “safe” and would lead one to certain destruction was
enough to immediately end that project, into a hemisphere where the
certainty of death made no difference and was simply not to be
discussed.

It was not from fear of punishment, therefore, that Ruth’s heart was
fluttering as the _Ribot_ drew up to the docks at Bordeaux; it was
from terror at thought of no longer being permitted to be one of
such a company as that upon this ship.

Men were directing the passengers to arrange themselves for
presentation of their credentials to the French authorities; and
Ruth found Lady Agnes taking her place beside her. The English girl
was well known and, after merely formal inquiry and the signing of a
few papers, she was passed on. She made a statement for Ruth of the
reasons for Ruth’s passport being in bad condition; and she
mentioned what she knew about Ruth. The Frenchmen attended politely,
but they did not, therefore, take chances. They examined her
passport far more carefully than they had Agnes Ertyle’s; but Ruth
had so ruined the picture that identification by it was impossible.
The sea water also had helped to blur the signature so that her
“Cynthia Gail” which they made her sign, and which they compared
with the name upon the passport, escaped open challenge. Then there
were questions.

The man who asked them referred to cards in an index box which,
evidently, had come across upon the _Ribot_; for his inquiries
referred largely to questions which had been asked Ruth upon the
other side. She, fortunately, had had sense enough to have written
down for herself the answers which she had given at New York; she
had rehearsed them again and again; so now she did not fail to give
similar replies. Then there were other inquiries--sudden, startling
ones, which gave her consternation; for they seemed based upon some
knowledge of the real Cynthia Gail which Ruth did not have. But she
had to answer; so she did so as steadily as possible and as
intelligently as she could.

The examiner gazed more keenly at her now; he halted his examination
to confer in whispers with an associate; he made careful notation
upon a card. A clerk brought in a cablegram, which the examiner
carefully read. Had the body of Cynthia Gail been identified in
Chicago? Had her family found out the fraud which Ruth had been
playing upon them; or had other discovery been made so that the
French knew that she was an impostor?

The man looked up from the cablegram.

“You have been in France before?” he challenged.

Ruth had thought of being asked that question. She had told Gerry
Hull at Mrs. Corliss’ that she had been in France--or at least she
had let him suppose so when he said that, of course, she had been in
Paris. She did not know at all whether Cynthia Gail had or not; but
that statement to Gerry Hull--which he might have
repeated--committed her.

“Not since the war began,” she answered.

“Previous to then?”

“Yes.”

“Upon how many occasions?”

“Once,” Ruth said.

“When was that?”

Ruth had figured out several occasions when Cynthia Gail might have
come abroad--if she really ever had done so. “The summer of 1913.”

“When did you land?”

“Late in June; I don’t recall the exact date.” She fixed June, as
she supposed Cynthia Gail would have come during summer vacation.

“Where did you land?”

“Dieppe. I crossed from New York on the _Adriatic_ of the White Star
Line to Plymouth for England first; then I crossed to France by
Newhaven-Dieppe.” She had picked up a good deal on board the
_Ribot_, you see.

“Visiting what places in France?”

“I spent most of my time in Paris; I was with my parents. We stayed
at the Hotel Regina.” Gerry Hull had said he supposed she had been
at the Regina or the Continental.

The readiness of these answers seemed to somewhat reassure the
examiner.

“You have friends in France?”

“Only acquaintances such as one makes traveling; no one whom I could
now place. I’ve letters to Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Mayhew, of Avenue
Kléber. I did not know them when I was in France before.”

The examiner made notations on his card.

“Report at your first opportunity, if you please, to your consul
general at Paris and obtain a passport in place of this!” He was
writing upon her passport now and handing it back to her! Whatever
reservation of judgment he had made in regard to her; whatever
orders he might give to watch her pending verification of her facts,
he was passing her on and permitting her to go with the others to
take the afternoon train to Paris!

She saw to customs and let Hubert order the transfer of her luggage;
then she was free upon the streets of her first foreign city. Not
for long; because the train for Paris left soon. But Hubert hired a
queer old cab, driven by a white-haired, Gallicly garrulous man, who
quickly understood that they were less interested in the wide
magnificence of the modern city than in the labyrinths of the old
town with its white, huddled houses facing quaint, gayly painted
shops about irregular squares, and looming at one another over the
narrowest of mediaeval streets.

They halted the cab and walked down the delightful defiles. Ruth had
to remember, in her raptures, that she was supposed to have been in
France before; but there were moments when Hubert left her--he
understood that she wanted to experience some of this alone--when
the incredible wonder that she was abroad overwhelmed her. She had
cabled, of course, to Cynthia Gail’s parents in Decatur; but she
wanted to cable her own mother to tell her where she was, and to buy
the pretty, picturesque postal cards, and send them to her sisters;
she wanted to write some of the wonder to all her friends; she would
have included even a card to Sam Hilton. But all that was
impossible.

Then the sight of French soldiers on the narrow streets and the
many, many French women in mourning--mothers and widows--returned
her to the grim, terrible business which had brought her here. She
rejoined Hubert where he had been waiting for her at the end of a
twisty, shadowy little street; he had bought a French newspaper; and
when she came beside him, he glanced up at her gravely.

“They’ve sunk a transport with American troops, Cynthia,” he said.

“Where? How many of our soldiers--?” she cried.

“The _Tuscania_ to the north of Ireland; torpedoed when we were at
sea. Two or three hundred of our men are missing; they don’t know
exactly how many yet.”

The news had reached the others of the _Ribot’s_ passengers, who
were taking the same train for Paris that afternoon. Ruth shared a
compartment in the little European-gauged cars, with Milicent
Wetherell and two French women; but the train was a “corridor
train,” as Ruth learned to say, and the occupants of the different
compartments could visit one another much as they might in the
larger American cars. There was news of recent air raids upon
Paris--one raid had been most deadly and destructive; there was news
of various sorts from the French and British fronts--a little news
also from the short American sectors; for it was announced that the
Americans had taken over a new portion of the line in Lorraine. But
the report of the successful attack of the U-boats upon the
_Tuscania_ overshadowed all other news.

It was not alone the loss of the hundreds of American soldiers; it
was the ugly threat that, where the U-boats at last had succeeded in
sinking a transport out of a convoy, they might succeed again and,
as the Germans had been boasting, they might--they just possibly
might cut that bridge of ships really beginning this month to bring
America over the seas. Ruth thrilled with discovery at how these
people here in France had come to count upon the arrival of her
people. She talked not only with the acquaintances from the _Ribot_,
but Milicent and she practiced their French upon the polite and
patient ladies from Bordeaux.

Ruth thus found that these French women were relieved that the
_Tuscania_ was not an American ship and had not been under convoy of
American destroyers when it was lost.

“They have the most appalling faith in us!” Ruth reported this to
Gerry when he stopped to speak with her during the afternoon. “They
think we can do anything; that we cannot fail!”

“That’s their way,” he warned. “We’re the new ally. The British must
have done wonders to get off all but two hundred men from a crowded
transport going down in a heavy sea.”

“I don’t mean that we could have done more,” Ruth said, “or that we
could have saved the _Tuscania_; I’m just glad people can believe so
in us. But it puts upon us an awful responsibility to make good.”

“It does,” Gerry agreed, laconically, and went on.

The train pulled into Poitiers--Poitiers of the battle of the Black
Prince in her _Green’s English History_! It ran on to Tours! Now the
names of even the little towns, as they neared Paris, were
familiarly full of legend and romance.

Hubert Lennon “looked by” in the evening, as he often had during the
day; and, as Milicent was visiting elsewhere just then, he sat down
beside Ruth.

She observed at once that something was troubling him--not a matter
which had affected him suddenly, but rather an uncertainty which
seemed to have been progressing for some time. He remained beside
her silent for several minutes while they looked out at the lights
of the little French hamlets. Finally he asked her in quite an
ordinary tone, so that the French women could not suspect any
challenge:

“You remember motoring down this way to Blois and Tours, and then
that run down the valley of the Loire?”

Ruth startled a little straighter and gazed out at the darkness
without answering. If Gerry Hull had asked her such a question she
would have bluffed the answer boldly; but Hubert had interrogated
her for a purpose; and he knew something of what Cynthia Gail had
done and had not done. Suddenly it dawned upon Ruth that that time,
nine years earlier, when Hubert had last seen Cynthia Gail, was not
in Chicago, as she had supposed, but here in France.

“Yes, I remember,” she replied weakly and without looking about.

“Your father and mother were with you, and my father--he was alive
then--and I; and who else was along?” he questioned, as though quite
casually, but Ruth knew that this was a test.

“I--don’t remember,” she faltered. She doubted whether Cynthia Gail
had been with him on any such trip; the whole question might merely
be a catch; well, if he suspected her and wanted to catch her,
certainly he had her. Her progress from the moment of her appearance
as Cynthia Gail had been made possible--she recognized--because of
his unsuspecting acceptance of her. That had won for her
championship in more powerful quarters which, in turn, had gained
her favor more influential still; yet the whole pyramid of that
favor balanced on the point of Hubert’s original acceptance.

So she sat in the dark awaiting what this strange friend of hers
should determine to do.

The French women in the opposite seats conversed between themselves.
The train was drawing into Paris, they said. The rapid rattle of
railroad joints and crosstracks confirmed this to Ruth, as well as
the more frequent noise of engines passing; she could see, too, low
shaded signal lights. But the environs of Paris had become more
black than the villages of the south; this was from danger of
repetition of the severe air raids of which Ruth had heard at
Bordeaux.

The train stopped; not at a station, nor did guards open the doors.
Everything was black without; the few lights, which Ruth had been
viewing, either had not been necessary thereabouts, or else they had
been extinguished; and, with the stilling of the train noise, a
weird, wailing moan rose through the night air.

“A siren!” Hubert said to Ruth. The French women, too, had
recognized the warning of a raid. A blast of a horn blew a loud
staccato _alerte_; and the siren--it evidently was on some
fast-driven car--diminished in the distance, wailing. Far off, but
approaching closer, sounded deep, rolling reverberations; not like
guns--Ruth knew guns now; nor yet like shells such as had burst on
board the _Ribot_. They were aerial torpedoes, of tremendous
violence, detonating in Paris buildings or upon the city streets.
Guns were going now; and their shells were smashing high in the air.

Ruth could see the flash of their break against the gleaming stars
of the clear, cold sky; she could see rockets and glaring flares.
The sound of the guns and the smash of the shells in the sky
redoubled; a mighty flash lit the ground a half mile or more away
across the railroad yards; it threw in brilliant silhouette for a
second, roofs, trees, chimneys against a crimson inferno of flame.

Hubert had the window open; and Ruth and the French women were
kneeling side by side to look out and up. They could see little
lights in the sky now; they could hear, between the smash of shells,
the hum of airplane motors and the rattle of brief bursts of
machine-gun fire.

Airplanes of defense were up there fighting the Germans--French
piloted those machines. But there might be Americans fighting there,
too. Ruth had read that once or twice American pilots had been among
those honored with the defense of Paris. She did not know whether it
was true; she had meant to ask Gerry Hull.

A few yards away in another compartment of another car--probably in
the compartment where Lady Agnes sat--Ruth knew that he was kneeling
before a window also gazing out; and she knew that the helpless
impulse which stirred her with desire to be out there above to fly
and fight was surging through him a thousand times intensified. She
could feel even Hubert Lennon twist and sway at struggle with that
impulse; how much more was Gerry Hull’s lithe, powerful body--that
strong, rhythmically moving form which had carried her--straining
now to join his comrades there above and to strike.

A flare of flame, not sharp and jagged like the burst of shells, nor
yet the streak of a rocket, nor like the glaring spot of a signal
light, wavered across the stars. Something clouded it--smoke. It
flung free from the smoke and dived, flaring bigger and brighter,
trailing behind it a streamer of black which blanketed both rockets
beyond and the stars; it dived on, burning.

Ruth’s heart throbbed like a hammer in her throat. “_Chute d’un
aéroplane!_” the French women cried.

“Fall of an airplane!”

It had been hit! The gasoline tank had ignited; it was going down in
flames. Whether friend or foe, no one on the train could know. Cries
reached Ruth from other compartments in the car. Everyone was seeing
it as it dropped down now faster and faster, its head burning
whiter; its streamer of smoke longer and broader before the stars.
The line of roofs and chimneys off to the south, which had shown in
glaring silhouette, sucked it from sight. It had crashed; and a
shudder shocked through Ruth as she pictured the pilot. She wanted
Gerry Hull beside her to know that he was safe; her hand groped in
the dark, without her will. It encountered Hubert’s and found his
trembling and cold.

“They’re going away, I think,” he said to reassure her.

The detonations of the torpedoes dropped upon the city surely were
less; the guns diminished their fire; the flashes in the sky were
farther away; and the hum of the airplane motors and the bursts of
machine-gun fire no longer were to be heard.

A bugle from somewhere blew a none-too-confident “All clear.” The
train moved on and drew after midnight into the darkened Gare du
Quai-d’Orsay.

It composed for Ruth a far different entrance to Paris than any she
had dreamed--the dark, almost deserted railroad station as a center
of an expanse vague and doubtful under the starlit city haze. A man
who repeated, “Mees Seenthya Gaiil” and “Meester Huber’ Len_non_,”
in patient, respectful intoning, stood at the gates from the train.
He had a car, toward which he escorted Ruth and Milicent (who, Ruth
insisted, must not try to find a place for herself that night) and
Hubert.

Several of the _Ribot’s_ men came and said good-bye to Ruth and
Milicent again and made last memoranda of how they could later be
located. Gerry Hull appeared and, in her brief moment with him, Ruth
marveled at the change in him. The air raid and the view of his
comrades fighting again and, too, this nearness of his return to
duty had banished all boyishness from him; a simple sternness
suddenly had returned him to a maturity which made her wonder how
she ever could have assumed to scold and correct him as once she
had.

He saw that Ruth and Milicent passed the formalities at the _gare_.
He ascertained that they had a vehicle; he brought to Ruth Lady
Agnes’ farewell and offer of assistance at any time. Then, saluting,
he said good-bye and they drove off.

Their car was keeping along the Quai-d’Orsay at first with the Seine
glinting below on the right. They passed a bridge.

“Pont de Solférino,” Hubert said.

They turned across the next bridge--“Pont de la Concorde!”

That brought to Ruth’s right the Garden of the Tuileries! They were
in the Place de la Concorde; they turned into the Champs-Elysées! It
was little more than a vague wideness of speeding shadows; but
Ruth’s blood was warm and racing. Hubert spoke to her, and when she
replied she knew that if he had questioned before whether she had
been previously in Paris he could not wonder now. But he spoke to
her as if she had, calling names of the places quietly to Milicent
rather than to her.

The car swerved into the Place de l’Etoile.

“The Arc-de-Triomphe!” Hubert cried. Ruth bent and saw its looming
bulk; they were upon the Avenue Kléber now and the car soon was
halting.

A single light burned in the hallway of a building of apartments
handsomer than any Ruth ever had seen; a door upon a second floor
opened and an American man and woman welcomed “Cynthia Gail” as Ruth
had never been welcomed anywhere in her life. These hospitable
people--they were Aunt Emilie’s cousins, the Mayhews--welcomed
Hubert, too, of course, and Milicent.

Ruth lay that night in a beautiful bed of gold and blue--the most
grateful, the most excited, the most humble and
insignificant-feeling girl in all France. When she had started out
upon this adventure in America she had seemed to herself to be
seizing an opportunity ordained for her by fate and entrusted to her
as the instrument for a great deed; now the fact that she was here,
and had come with an idea that she could greatly do, seemed the most
assuming conceit in the world.

The next morning when she went out upon the avenues in the uniform,
which now she was to wear constantly, the pettiness of her part
reimpressed itself with every square she passed as she witnessed the
throngs of soldiers--of a dozen races, of innumerable
nations--gathered for the war. She went with Hubert to the American
consulate, where she applied for a new passport to replace the
ruined one; then, proceeding alone to the office where Cynthia Gail
was to report, she accepted gladly the simple, routine duties
assigned her.

That same day she and Milicent found a room in a _pension_ upon the
Rue des Saints Pères, where Hubert and Mrs. Mayhew called upon her
the next evening. But if Gerry Hull had inquired for her at the
Mayhew’s, his inquiry resulted in no visit to the Rue des Saints
Pères. Lieutenant Gerry Hull was transferred--so Ruth read in a
_Matin_ of the next week--to the American forces and was flying now
under his own flag. And with his return to duty it seemed that he
must have lost concern for a girl satisfied to do half-clerical,
half-charity relief work among refugees in Paris.

Of course Ruth did not think of herself as merely doing such work;
she considered herself as waiting for further instructions from the
Germans.

The orders which she had received from the spy in Chicago had
directed her to take up this work of Cynthia Gail’s; and only by
following these orders could she hope to carry out her plan.

She found far more talk of German agents, and far more certainty of
their activities, in Paris than she had heard about in Chicago. The
difference was that while in Chicago the presence and the activities
of German spies was extraordinary, here it was the everpresent and
accepted thing--like the arrival of trains of wounded from the front
and air raids upon clear nights. She learned that the Germans
undertook no important enterprise without information from their
agents in France; she learned that, as in America, these agents were
constantly being taken. It was plain to her, therefore, that they
could scarcely have any rigid organization or any routine method of
reports or intercommunication. They must operate by creating or
seizing sudden opportunities.

During the noon hour upon a day in the middle of February, Ruth left
the relief rooms, where she had been working, to wander in the
winter sunlight by Notre Dame, where bells were ringing for some
special mass. She went in and stood in the nave, listening to the
chants, when she observed a gentleman of about fifty, evidently a
Parisian, go to a pew beyond her and kneel down. She noticed him
because she had seen him at least twice before when she was coming
out of her office, and he had observed her with keener glance than
gentlemen of his apparent station were accustomed to bestow.

She went from the cathedral after a few minutes and wandered up the
Rue St. Jacques toward the Sorbonne, when the same man suddenly
appeared about a corner and--a rather gusty wind was blowing--his
hat left his head and blew toward Ruth. She stooped quickly and
picked it up.

He thanked her effusively in French and, observing that she was an
American in uniform, he extended compliments upon the participation
of America, which made it impossible for Ruth to go on at once.
Suddenly, and without change in his tone, he inquired her name.

“Cynthia Gail,” she gave it, without thinking anything in
particular.

“From what city?” he inquired.

“Decatur, Illinois.”

“You are to make effort at once to leave Paris to go to the district
of Roisel. Never mind the Americans; there will be few there.
Observe British dispositions; of their Fifth Army; their
headquarters; what forces in reserve present; what movements
indicating a lengthening of their front. Return here after two
weeks; not later than three. It is the wonder of America, observe!”
he proceeded in the same tone as a man went by, “that it saves not
only my country, my civilization, but even, for me, my hat! I thank
you again, Mademoiselle. _Bon jour!_” He bowed and was off.




CHAPTER IX: TO PICARDY


Ruth stood galvanized for a second. The man, beyond doubt, was a
German agent; he had addressed her as a spy. There was no other
possible explanation.

When the woman at Mrs. Corliss’ had disclosed herself as an enemy,
Ruth had balanced the harm the woman might do to America against the
harm she, herself, might do Germany, and Ruth had decided, rightly
or wrongly, to remain quiet. Now she could not do so. A German spy
in Chicago was a distant, only indirectly dangerous person; a spy in
Paris did most direct things--such as setting colored lights at the
bottoms of chimneys to guide the great black-crossed _Gothas_ which
bombed Paris by night, blowing down those buildings in the ruins of
which Ruth had seen men frantically digging by the early morning
light; they did things such as ... Ruth did not delay to catalog in
that flash the acts of Germans in Paris. She knew that man must be
arrested at whatever cost to herself.

She started after him down the Rue St. Jacques in the first spur of
this impulse. Fortunately, after leaving her, he did not gaze back,
but proceeded alertly along the street. A man and a woman spoke to
him; he bowed. Another passer-by bowed to him with the deference
shown a gentleman of importance and position. And Ruth slowed her
pursuit and followed a little distance behind him. He turned to the
Boulevard St. Michel, where others bowed to him, crossed the
boulevard and went into the Ecole de Médecine.

Ruth halted a man who had spoken to him and inquired, please, the
name of the gentleman who had just passed. The Frenchman informed
politely, “Monsieur de Trevenac.”

“The entire name, please?” Ruth pressed.

“Monsieur Louis de Trevenac,” the name was repeated as of one well
known. Ruth proceeded to the door of the Ecole de Médecine, where
inquiry confirmed the name; M. de Trevenac had just entered.

Ruth abandoned the pursuit. She was shaking with excitement under
her trim, khaki uniform and cape; but coolness had come to
her--coolness and that calm, competent thought which always
succeeded the irresponsible impulse with her. The German agent, M.
Louis de Trevenac, was not trying to escape from Paris; his
business, undoubtedly, was to remain here, and not in hiding, but
prominent and well known. If she accused him to a gendarme the alarm
would go at once to his confederates; it would be the stupidest and
clumsiest action she could take. Now that she knew him, she could
move most effectively by indirection; she need not betray herself at
all, either to the French or to the Germans.

She returned across the Seine and went to her work while she thought
it out. She could accomplish her purpose partly, perhaps, through
Hubert Lennon. She might accomplish it more safely through the aid
of other men whom she now knew; or through Mr. Mayhew. But she could
accomplish it best through Gerry Hull.

Accordingly she telephoned to Hubert that afternoon to meet her at
the _pension_ as soon as possible; and when he came, she asked him
if he knew where Gerry Hull was.

He was in Paris, Hubert had to confess; he had been in Paris for two
days.

Ruth could not help coloring. “I need to see him, Hubert. Tell me
where I can find him and I shall go there.”

“I’ll see that he comes here,” Hubert offered, a little
belligerently.

“Perhaps that is better,” Ruth accepted. Her orders from the Germans
had been to cultivate her acquaintance with Gerry Hull; yet, if they
were watching her now, it was better to have them see him come to
her. “But you must get him at once,” she said.

Hubert succeeded within the hour, for it was not yet five in the
afternoon when Gerry Hull appeared on the Rue des Saints Pères,
found the little _pension_ and rang. Ruth had him ushered into a
small private parlor, where she and Milicent entertained; she saw
him there alone.

He did not pretend that he had been about to call upon her when she
summoned him; nor did he apologize for not having called before. He
was glad to see her, particularly when it became plain that she had
sent for him for help in an emergency.

“I have received information, which I am quite sure is reliable,”
she said to him after she had closed the door and they sat down,
“but which I wish to have used anonymously, if it is at all
possible.”

“Information against someone?” he asked.

“Against a man who goes by the name of Louis de Trevenac,” she said
in a low voice. The placards all about Paris warning, _Be on guard!
Enemy ears listen!_ influenced her even behind the closed doors.

Gerry Hull started. Not greatly, for he had been in France long
enough to hear accusations--false or true--against almost anyone.

“You know him?” Ruth asked.

“He is well known,” Gerry said. “I’ve heard of him.”

“I am absolutely certain that he is a German spy.”

“How do you know?”

“If I wanted to tell how I know, I would not have sent for you. It
was not easy,” Ruth said with a gentle sweetness which caught him
with a flush. “I thought it was possible that you would know a
method of starting inquiry regarding one without having to give
details of the cause of your suspicion.”

Gerry nodded. “That’s possible.”

“Then please do that in regard to M. Louis de Trevenac. At once!”

He regarded her, conscious of having to make an effort to consider
what she asked without feeling for her. The attraction to her which
instantly had given him curiosity about her that first time they
met--attraction not merely to her warm, glowing vitality, but to the
purpose which imbued her and to the challenge of her eager, honest
mind--was swaying him. He got for a moment, and quite without his
will, the feeling of her lithe, round little form warm against him,
though she was drenched by the sea, that time he carried her. He
banished that deliberately by recalling the offense she had given
him of the criticism, as he had taken it and as he still took it, of
his comrades, and of himself, and of the great beliefs for which and
in which he lived.

He could not possibly question the whole loyalty of this girl; he
was not even considering that as he gazed at her. He really was
watching the pretty, alluring, all unconscious pulsations of color
in the clear, soft skin of her cheek and temple; he was watching the
blue of her eyes under her brown brows; watching the tiny tremblings
of her slender, well-shaped hands; and--as Sam Hilton used to do--he
was watching the hues of light glint in her hair as she moved her
head.

“I can try that, Miss Gail,” he said at last. “If there’s nothing
found out, there will be no particular concern for the source of
suspicion; but if what you say’s true, I may have to ask you a good
deal more.”

He left it thus when he went away a little later; for, though he
would have liked to stay, she did not wish him to, insisting that he
must proceed against Louis de Trevenac at once.

He did so; with results which brought him back to her at the end of
the second day.

“What else do you know in connection with De Trevenac?” he demanded
of her as soon as they were alone.

“You’re satisfied that he’s a spy?”

“The French found,” Gerry said, “a most astonishing lot of things.
They’ve mopped up about twenty more besides De Trevenac--twenty
they’d never even looked into. How did you know about him?”

The discoveries had brought Gerry to her almost in awe; and there
surged through her an impulse to tell him how she knew and all about
herself--to end to him and with him the long, every-waking-minute,
every-sleeping-minute strain of being an impostor, of facing
exposure, of playing a part. She had not let herself feel how that
strain pulled upon her, how lonely and frightened she was at times,
how ill it made her--sick physically as well as sick at heart--to
write her cheerful, newsy letters to Cynthia Gail’s parents, and to
read the letters written by mother and father to Cynthia, and to
which she must again reply; to write to the little boy in Decatur as
his sister would write; to write also--and in ways this was the
hardest--to the man who had loved Cynthia Gail and who, believing
that Cynthia was alive and she was Cynthia, was pouring out his love
to her in letters to which also she must reply and either make him
think that the girl whom he loved, and who had loved him, still
lived, and would not forgive him a single hasty word, or else that
she lived, and still loved him, and would be his in his arms again.

For a moment the impulse almost overmastered Ruth; but then she had
the better of it. If she told even this man who might trust
her--might, but how could she be sure?--she put the direction of her
fate in other hands. If she had told him about herself at Mrs.
Corliss’ or upon the boat, he would have prevented her from
proceeding alone as she had; he would have believed her unable to
best accomplish things by herself, or he would have thought the risk
too great; or some obstacle would have arisen to prevent her doing
that not inconsiderable thing she already had done.

If she was willing to give up now--to relieve herself of further
risk and become merely what she seemed, an ordinary girl worker, in
France--why she could tell him. But if she was to go ahead into the
greater hazards of which she dreamed, she must go of herself.

“I could tell you,” Ruth said, gazing up at Gerry, “that when I was
on the street I happened to overhear a conversation which made me
sure that he was a spy.”

“But it would not be the truth.”

“No; not quite.”

“I knew so.”

She looked down and he saw her suddenly shiver. He put a hand
quickly upon her and then the other hand; he held her by her slender
shoulders, her round arms quivering under his fingers. His pulses
leaped with warm, thrusting waves which seemed to start in his hands
holding her and to shake his whole body.

“What is it?” he asked.

She raised a hand and gently with her fingers, released one hand of
his from her shoulder; he removed the other.

“What have we done with De Trevenac and the rest?”

“They’re in a safe place for further investigation; nothing else,
yet.”

“But we’re going to?”

“Give ’em a trial, of course; and then shoot some of ’em anyway.”

“Monsieur de Trevenac?”

“Him pretty surely.”

A shudder jerked her shoulders together in a spasm; he wanted to
still her under his hands; but he did not. He knew why she asked
particularly about De Trevenac; she had seen him, heard his voice,
perhaps; she could picture him standing blindfolded to be shot--upon
her information. He would be her first slain.

Gerry had been a bit more brutal in his way of telling her than he
had intended; indeed, now he did not understand himself. He had
acted upon instinct to torment, rather than spare her, to see how
she took it.

She raised her head proudly. She’s beautiful, he thought. The poise
of that well-shaped head always was pretty; her shoulders, even
under the khaki, were pretty; they were well-formed, firm shoulders.
His gaze had dropped to them from her eyes; but now went back to her
blue eyes again.

“Did you ever see--before--a man you had to kill?” she asked.

“A few times,” he said.

“The first man you killed?”

“The first man I ever was certain that I killed was when I was in
the foreign legion,” he said. “We were advancing, using bayonets.
The Huns weren’t expecting an offensive there; it was the first year
after they’d failed in France and were using their best troops in
Russia. We found a Landsturm regiment against us--middle-aged men,
married mostly, I suppose; fathers. I saw the face of one a second
or so before I put my bayonet through him. A couple of times since,
maneuvering for position in the air, I’ve got a good glimpse at
chaps I was lucky enough to shoot down afterwards. I’d rather have
not, you know,” he confessed.

“I know,” Ruth said. “But we’re going to kill them--kill men, men,
and more men! We have to. I’ll not be too soft, don’t fear! I’ve
been all this month among women--girls and children, too--from the
departments they’ve overrun! Not that they’ve told me much which I
didn’t believe before; but--well, getting it direct is different.”

“Yes.”

He was thinking, she knew, of their initial encounter; was she so
pleased and proud of the tardiness of America now?

“I found out a remarkable thing from some Belgians,” she said, half
in answer to this unspoken challenge. “They told me that after the
Germans took complete possession of their country and forbade them
to wear Belgian colors or even rosette symbols, they took to wearing
American colors. We were neutral then; and the Germans didn’t dare
stop it; so they all wore, as their symbol of defiance, our flag!”

“That was when everyone thought always that we must come in,” he
rejoined. He was not thinking about what she was saying, but of her.
“You’ve had more in your mind all along than just coming here to do
relief work,” he announced his thought aloud to her.

“Yes, I had.”

“Can I ask what it is?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“But you’ve been doing some of it?”

“Some.”

“You’re going to keep at it?”

“If you’ll let me.”

“You mean by not making you tell how you found out about De Trevenac
and by keeping you out of that?”

She nodded.

“But you must tell me anything else of that sort you know.”

“I don’t know anything more of that sort except this: he had orders
to see that someone be sent to the vicinity of Roisel to observe
particularly dispositions of the British Fifth Army--their reserve
strength and whether there were signs that they will extend their
front.”

“That’s absolutely all?”

“Absolutely all--except that I think that was a particularly
imperative order.”

“They’d be sending people all along that front,” Gerry said. “We
know they’re to try an offensive where the armies join; the only
doubt is when. I say, I’ll report for you that you just overheard
something on the street; and I’ll try to get past with it. If I
can’t, you’ll see me here soon again; and soon anyway, if you don’t
mind, please.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Ruth said simply, “but I’ll not be here. I’m
leaving Paris in the morning.”

“Ho! Where to?”

“I applied day before yesterday for field work and got it; so I’m
going to Picardy.”

“That’s no address. What part?”

“Roisel.”

“Hmm!”

Was he evolving--she wondered--the fact that De Trevenac’s order to
someone to go to Roisel had been delivered to her?

Gerry had not got that far. He was thinking that this strange girl,
so unlike any other one whom he had known well, was evidently
determined to watch for herself the outcome about Roisel. He was
thinking, too, that Roisel was decidedly an inconvenient place for
him to visit. To be sure, it was in that direction that Agnes Ertyle
would be at work, for the hospital units, to which she was attached,
were caring for casualties from the Fifth Army; but till she would
be about that part of Picardy, he would have no errands likely to
take him there. And he wished that he had; or that this girl would
soon again be where he could see her.

The days when he could be free from duty were few and brief now; and
with the swift onset of spring they were certain to be fewer. For
tremendous movements--the most stupendous in all human history--were
clearly imminent; men, and women too, were certain to be called upon
to die in number beyond all past calculation.

Gerry Hull did not think of himself as one of those certain to die;
neither did he think of himself as one likely to live. Long ago he
had attained that new imbuement of being, independent of all
estimates of continuance of self, which was content with disposing
of the present hours as best might be. So he had been spending his
hours, whenever possible, with Agnes Ertyle; his next distant day
was to be with her. And heretofore there had been no other desire to
disturb him.

Now he was conscious--not of any inclination to spend an hour away
from Agnes when he might possibly be with her--but only of concern
for this blue-eyed, light-haired, warm, ardent girl from among his
own people.

“I don’t know what else you’re doing, Cynthia Gail,” he said both
names as he had that time he had carried her, “but I suppose it’s
dangerous. That’s all right,” he added hastily, “if the danger’s
necessary; if it’s not--well, it’s foolishness, you know. I wouldn’t
ask you to stop doing anything which could catch us another haul
like De Trevenac; but that may be more than a deadly game.” He held
out his hand to her and, when she placed hers in his, he held her
fingers firmly. “Don’t be foolish, please!”

“Don’t you!” she pleaded to him in return; and the sudden broaching
of the passion which had been below astounded her as much as it
dumfounded him. “You take no regard for yourself--none, none at
all!”

“That’s--newspaper nonsense,” he managed. He released her hand, but
her grasp held him now and he could not break it except violently.

“It’s not! I’ve talked to men who know you, who’ve flown with you!
They all say the same thing; and they all love you for it; you’ve no
regard for yourself, numbers against you or anything when you’ve
something you’ve determined to do! You do it! Oh, I wouldn’t have
you not--I wouldn’t want you different. But the same need now
doesn’t exist!”

Her fingers had slipped from him and they stood back a bit, both
breathing hard and very flushed as they faced each other.

“We’re outnumbered in France this spring as never before,” he
informed her soberly. “It’s not generally--discussed; but, since
Russia’s absolutely out, that’s the fact.”

“I know,” she said. “But what I meant was that you, and just a few
others, aren’t the only Americans here now. Oh, I’ve been able to
understand why you’ve flown and fought as you have, why your friends
are almost all fallen now and you, only by the grace of our God, are
left! I think I understood some of your feeling even before I knew
you and heard you speak. You and your friends whom you thought I
insulted--you, for a while, had to do the fighting for all America;
a score or so of you had to do, you felt, for a hundred million of
us who wouldn’t come in! But we’re coming now; a good many of us are
here!”

“Many?” he repeated. “A couple of hundred thousand among millions.
And the German millions are almost ready to strike! Forgive me, I
didn’t mean to scold you ever again for America; but--oh, you’ll
see! The husbands, and fathers, and the boys of France, the
husbands, and fathers, and the boys of England taking the blow
again, giving themselves to the guns to save us all while our young
men watch!”

She gazed up at him, but stayed silent now. Terror seized her that
she had done only harm, that she had stirred him to greater
regardlessness. His anger against her people, whom she defended,
had--as at that first time--banished his feeling for her. When he
gave her his hand again, he barely touched her fingers; and he was
gone.

Returning that night to his squadron at the front, he wrote her an
apology; but, after reading it over, tore it up. His squadron was
stationed far to the east and south of Roisel; and there was at that
time nothing in the military situation to give him greater concern
for that particular sector. Yet when news arrived he scanned it
quickly for report of operations about Roisel. However, though he
twice got leave of a day, he did not on either occasion penetrate
farther into Picardy than the little city where Lady Agnes now
lived.

All along the front, from Switzerland to the sea, the calm
continued; but few on either side of that line held illusions as to
the nature of that calm. Then, as all the world knows, suddenly upon
a morning the storm broke.

Gerry Hull received the bulletins which came over the military wire
which brought him also his orders. These orders were for his
squadron at once to move and report for service at the earliest
possible moment at a certain point in Picardy--which orders, as
orders usually go, were unexplained except as the news bulletins
gave them meaning.

The news, however, left no loopholes for doubt. The great German
assault, which had begun the morning before, already had developed a
complete break-through of the British front. The Germans, in one
tremendous dash, had overrun the first lines of defense, the second,
and the third; they were advancing now in open country with only
remnants of an army before them; and the center of this huge wave of
the enemy advance was what had been the French village of Roisel.




CHAPTER X: THE GREAT ATTACK


The English guns began it.

To the world the great battle started with the German onslaught of
the morning of that Thursday, the twenty-first of March; but to
Ruth, the beginning was with the English guns--the guns of the
evening before, rolling and resounding over the Picardy plain.

The night seemed to have embarked upon stillness in its earlier
hours. The “line”--that dim, neighboring bulwark descending from the
far indefiniteness of the North Sea to approach close to the little
hamlet of Mirevaux, to seem indeed to point into Mirevaux but for a
twist which turned it away and deflected it, sweeping southward, and
east, and south again toward the farther fastness of the Alps--the
line had been absolutely quiet. A great many airplanes had been up
during the afternoon, Ruth had observed as she gazed toward the line
from Mirevaux; their wings had specked the sky of the twilight. When
the afterglow was gone and the moon held the heavens, little colored
lights flashed frequently before the stars of the east, marking
where many night-flying pilots plied on their errands; but these
signals seemed at first not to be for the guns. The moon illumined a
drowsy Mirevaux, war-ravaged, but rewon, and dreaming itself secure
again behind that barrier of earth, and men, and guns, and gas, and
airplanes over the slopes of the east which the English held.

And not alone Mirevaux so dreamed. Many persons of far wider
information than the French peasants and without the French folks’
love of their own home farms to influence them, also imagined
Mirevaux quite safe--the hard-headed and quite practical, though
impulsive persons who made up a certain American committee for the
restoration of war-ravaged lands, had moved, and seconded, and
decreed in committee meeting that Mirevaux was definitely and
finally removed from the zone of invasion and, therefore, that the
committee’s representative in Mirevaux should be authorized to
expend for temporary and permanent restoration so many thousands of
francs a month.

It was the useful expenditure of these sums which had brought Ruth
Alden, as assistant and associate to Mrs. Gregory Mayhew, to
Mirevaux from Roisel in the first week of March and which, upon the
quiet moonlit evening of that Wednesday, the twentieth, detained
Ruth at the cottage of old Grand’mère Bergues, who with her
grandchildren--Victor and _petite_ Marie--had outstayed the German
occupation of Mirevaux from August of the first year of the war to
the great retreat of February, 1917, when the enemy went back to the
Hindenburg line, destroying unremovable property and devastating
orchard and farm.

Grand’mère Bergues stood at the door of the little cottage which,
last autumn, had been restored as well as obtainable materials
permitted. The moon shone down upon what had been an orchard; but
the Germans, before their retreat, had systematically sawed through
the trunk of each tree till the tree fell. The French, as quickly as
possible, had regrafted the top upon the stump and thus had saved a
great many trees; and the new buds upon them, showing that these had
survived the winter and would bloom and fruit again, brought to
Grand’mère Bergues a sense of triumph over the Boche.

Grand’mère Bergues needed all the triumph she could feel. Her son,
Laurent, lay in one of those white-crossed graves of the defenders
of Douaumont at Verdun; her own daughter Mathilde, who had married a
merchant of Carnières, which was beyond Cambrai, had not been heard
of since the first year of the war. Laurent’s wife--well, she had
been a young and beautiful woman and Grand’mère Bergues either told
nothing of what had been her fate when the Germans came or else she
told it again and again in abandon.

“They bound me to the bedpost; and one said--he was a pink-faced
pig, with the pink--ugh!--all about his head through his
closecropped hair--he said, ‘Remove her.’

“‘No; it is better to let her see. But keep her quiet!’

“So they stuffed in my mouth....”

Ruth well knew the frightful facts; she knew that, three years ago,
there had been little Laurent--a baby--too.

“These things,” said Grand’mère Bergues, “you did not believe at
first.”

“No,” Ruth said, “we did not.”

“It is not to be wondered at,” the old woman said simply. “The
wonderful fact is that now you arrive!”

She trudged along beside Ruth through the ruin of the orchard and
halted with her hand upon the bough of an apple tree which was one
of those that the French had grafted and saved.

“I saw them cut this down; they measure so many centimeters from the
ground; they start to saw; they cut so far through; they stop; it is
destroyed! Ah, but I shall pluck apples this August, oh, beast pigs,
brutes below all others!” she apostrophized quite calmly. “How may
those who have the form of men be such fools, too?” she asked Ruth.
“When they are here--those who bound me to the bed and their
comrades--they say that they would be the friends of France. The
English, they say, are our enemies; we shall see! Well, the English
are about us now as they have been; and look, I have come of my own
will away from Victor and Marie, leaving them alone, sleeping. Such
danger now! And you, Mademoiselle, you are younger and as beautiful
even as my Laurent’s wife--you go on, quite safe, unaccompanied.”

Ruth proceeded quite safely, indeed; but not unaccompanied for long.
The English, as Grand’mère Bergues said, were all about--a regiment
was lying in reserve just then beyond Mirevaux; and a certain young
lieutenant, who had been one of the guests at a tea at Mrs. Mayhew’s
cottage a week ago, was awaiting Ruth upon the road. His name was
Haddon-Staples; but he was so like “1582” of the _Ribot_ that Ruth
had dubbed him to herself “1583” and she appreciated him hugely.

Hardly had he caught step with her when the guns began--the English
guns.

The firing was heavy--no heavier, perhaps, than Ruth often had heard
at night during the days near Mirevaux, but tonight it seemed to
Ruth to have a more intense, more nervous quality.

“Box barrage, sounds like,” Haddon-Staples volunteered when Ruth
stopped to study the direction of the action. “Not much on, I should
say. Trench raid for information, probably.”

“When do you suppose they’ll attack?”

They, of course, were the Germans. “Oh, any time. That’s what we’re
out for a bit of a line on tonight--naturally. Sooner they try it,
the better, don’t you think?”

“You’re--we’re all ready for them?” Ruth asked.

“Ready as may be,” the Englishman returned politely. “They’ve rather
the advantage of us, you know--numerically. A good bit of a farm
here again, isn’t there?” he shifted the subject, gazing over the
level, planted fields.

Ruth talked with him about other things; but her thought remained
with those English guns firing and firing, with the English gunners
serving them, with the English infantry raiding “for information” or
lying in wait for the certain-coming attack of an enemy having a
recognized advantage--numerically. The reason that the enemy
possessed that advantage was, she knew, that America was not yet in
force on the battle line. But for that tardiness, she had not yet
heard one word of censure from Englishmen or from the French.

The guns were still going when she went to bed at half-past ten--the
English guns with the German guns attempting only ordinary reply. So
Ruth slept until a quaking of the ground and a sudden, tremendous
new impact of sound sat her up in the darkness, awake. She gazed at
her watch; it was half-past four. German guns now were sending the
monstrous missiles whose detonation shook the land; it was the
English guns which attempted the reply. Ruth went to her window and
gazed out in the dark toward the lines until the gray of dawn
discovered a thin gray mist over the ground--a mist of the sort
making for surprises of attacking forces upon the forces defending;
and that frightful fire of the German guns meant that, this morning
at last, the Germans were attacking.

Ruth dressed as Mrs. Mayhew and everyone else in the house was
dressing. The thunder of the guns, the never-ceasing concussion of
the bursting shells rolled louder and nearer.

“That must be the start of their offensive,” Mrs. Mayhew said. “Let
them try; they’ll never get through!”

“No,” Ruth said; and she believed it. She thought of the German
attacks upon Ypres in the early years of the war; of their failure
at Verdun last year and the slow progress of the allies when they
had been on the offensive--the French in Champagne and the English
on the Somme. The others also believed it.

“What will you be about today, dear?” Mrs. Mayhew asked Ruth.

“Oh!”--Ruth needed the moment of the exclamation to recollect. “I’m
going to Aubigny to see that our last lot of portable houses got
there all right and that the people know how to put them up.”

“Then come with me; I’m going to Ham,” Mrs. Mayhew offered, and
during the morning, quite as usual, they drove off together in Mrs.
Mayhew’s car about their business of helping rehouse and shelter and
refurnish the peasants of Picardy.

While they rode in the bright morning sunshine--for the mist was
cleared now--guns, English guns emplaced far behind the lines and
whose presence they had never suspected before, thundered out; their
concussion added to the trembling of the ground; and through the air
swept sounds--swift, shrill, and ominous--not heard on the days
before.

“Shells?” Mrs. Mayhew asked.

Ruth nodded. She had heard the shriek of the shells which had missed
the _Ribot_ and passed over. “Shells, I think,” she said. They were
passing peasants on the road now--families of peasants or such
relics of families as the war had left; some, who had a horse, drove
a wagon heaped high with the new household goods which they had
gained since the invasion; some pushed barrows; others bore bundles
only.

Ruth, who was driving, halted the car again and again.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“We do not know,” the peasants answered.

Ruth drove on into the little city of Ham, where ambulances bearing
the English wounded were arriving in an endless line from the front.
Mrs. Mayhew had seen wounded men--many, many of them--in the Paris
hospitals; Ruth too had seen wounded--almost two score of people
variously hurt aboard the _Ribot_. But here they came, not as
_blessés_ arrived in Paris, but from the battle field and, not by
scores, but by hundreds, by thousands!

Ruth went sick when she saw them. She thought of Hubert, her
gentle-minded, sensitive Hubert, now helping to handle men so hurt.
She thought of Agnes Ertyle when she saw English women, as well as
English men, receiving the forms from the ambulances at the great
casualty clearing stations where new rows of tents hastily were
going up. She thought, of course, of Gerry Hull. She believed that
he was far removed from this zone of battle; but she did not yet
know--no one yet knew--how far the fighting front was extending. He
might be flying at this moment over a front most heavily involved;
she knew that he would wish to be; and how he would fight--fight as
never before and without regard of himself to check disaster due, as
he would believe, to the tardiness of his country.

She saw a boy in the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps lying upon a
stretcher in the sunshine; he was smoking, but he took his cigarette
from his lips to smile at her as she gazed down at him.

British troops--strong, young, uninjured men--marching in
battalions; English guns and ammunition lorries; more English
infantry and guns poured into the streets of the city, passed
through them and on to the front and more came. The wounded from the
front and the French folk from the farms and villages passed on
their way to the rear; but no one else came back.

“The line is steadying itself; it’s holding,” the rumor ran in Ham
during the afternoon. “The Boche gained at first--everyone on the
offensive gains at first--but now we’re holding them; we’re
slaughtering them as they come on.” Then more alarming reports
spread. “They’ve overrun the first lines at points; but the others
are holding or are sure to--the Boche are doing better than at
Verdun.” Then that was denied. “They’re not doing so well. We’re
holding them now. They’re coming on. They’re driving us back.”

Not even the wounded and the refugees, still streaming from the
front, brought reliable report; the battle was too immense for that.
And into the battle, English reinforcements steadily went forward.
So Ruth was sure only that the great battle, which the world had
been awaiting, was begun; she could know nothing of the true fortune
of that first tremendous day. She was finding, however, that Mrs.
Mayhew and she could not go about their work of restoration. They
turned their car upon the road and, inviting refugees, they carried
the peasants swift miles along the roads which they had been
trudging; let them off ten miles or so to the rear and returned for
more.

But they urged no one to flee; they simply assisted those already in
flight and who would not be turned back. And that evening, which was
more quiet than the evening before--or at least it seemed so in
comparison to the day--they returned to Mirevaux. The worst was
past, they believed; the line, the English and the French line which
for more than three years had stood and held against the Germans,
had reformed and reestablished itself after the first shake of the
tremendous onslaught.

And so it still seemed to those in Mirevaux that next morning of
Friday when, after breakfast, Ruth discussed again with Mrs. Mayhew
what she would do that day. They were agreeing that they should be
calm and show confidence and go about their work as usual, when they
heard the hoofs of a galloping horse upon the road. The rider pulled
up short before their cottage and Ruth, running to the door, saw
“1583”--the English officer who had waited for her upon the road
from Grand’mère Bergues’ the night before last.

“They’ve broken through!” he called to Ruth.

“Through!” Ruth cried. “The Germans!”

“We can’t hold them! They’re coming on! Fifty thousand of them!
They’ve broken through--through! We couldn’t hold them!”

Ruth recoiled upon the door. Mrs. Mayhew was beside her, calling out
to the officer; but he, having given the alarm to that house, was
going on. Ruth gazed vacantly over the smooth, replowed, replanted
French fields and the rows of grafted orchard trees toward
Grand’mère Bergues’; and her mind gave her, in a flash, vision of
the broken dam of the English line with the German flood bursting
through; and before that flood she saw again the refugees of
yesterday in flight; she saw Grand’mère Bergues with _petite_ Marie
and Victor caught again, perhaps; she saw the wounded on the roads
and in the tents of the clearing stations, cut off by the Germans
and taken; she saw the English troops--the strong, young men whom
she had witnessed marching to the front yesterday--battling bravely,
desperately, but shot down, bayoneted and overrun.

“They’ve broken through. We couldn’t hold them! They’re coming on!”

Ruth gazed from the ground to the sky and she saw--not in her fancy
but visually above her now--airplanes, allied airplanes flying in
squadrons from the rear toward that front which she could not see
but where, she knew, the line on the ground was broken and gone and
where the Germans, who were “coming on,” must be pouring through.
And her mind showed her in the pilot’s seat of one of those
airplanes--or in one just like them somewhere on that broken
front--Gerry Hull. Vividly she fancied his face as he flew to fight
and to make up, as well as one man might, for the millions of his
people who should have been yesterday and today upon that broken
battle line where the enemy, at last, had broken through!

Ruth could not know then all that a break “through” meant; no one
could know; for in all the fighting in France, no army had broken
“through” before. She could know only that upon her, as an American
quite as much as Gerry Hull, was the charge to do her uttermost.

But what was she to do?

Gerry, arriving that morning at the airdrome to which he had been
ordered, possessed the advantage over her of no uncertainty but of
definite assignment to duty.

During his training and his service with the French, he had piloted
many sorts of machines. He had flown the reconnaissance and
photographic biplanes with duty merely to bring back information of
the enemy’s movements; he had flown the bombing machines entrusted
with destruction, by aerial torpedo, of batteries, and ammunition
dumps behind the enemy’s front; he had flown the “artillery
machines”--the biplanes with wireless by which he, or his observer,
signaled to the French batteries the fall of their shots and guided
the guns to the true targets; he had flown, as all the world knew,
the swift-darting _avions de chasse_--the airplanes of pursuit--the
Nieuports and the Spads in which, as combat pilot, he had dueled ten
thousand feet up in the sky with the German combat pilots and shot
some twenty of them down. And it was while he was still in the
French service that the flying men began to form new squadrons for
strange service distinct from mere bomb-dropping, from guiding guns
or sending back information or from fighting other airplanes. Pilots
of these squadrons started to attack, by bomb and machine guns, the
enemy infantry and artillery and horse. They had special, new
“ships” made for them--one-seater or two-seater biplanes mounting
two or three machine guns and built to stand the strain of diving
down from a height and “flattening out” suddenly only a few yards
from the ground while the pilot with his machine guns raked the
ranks of troops over which he flew.

It was in one of these new raiding airplanes, accordingly, and as
leader of a flight that Gerry Hull was going to battle this day. The
field, from which he had arisen, had been far back of the English
lines--so far back, indeed, that it still was secure as Gerry guided
his flight of six machines up into the clear spring sunshine. His
was one of the single-seaters; he was alone, therefore, as he led on
to the north and east; and he was glad this morning to be alone. The
exaltation which almost always pervaded him as he rose into the sky
with his motor running powerfully and true, possessed him at its
most this morning; it brought to him, together with the
never-dulling wonder of his endowment of wings and his multiplied
strength therefrom, a despite of fate which made him reckless yet
calm.

His altimeter told that he had climbed to some four thousand feet
and content with that height and flying level, he glanced about and
saw that the machines which followed him were flattening out too and
in position. He gazed at his mapboard where was displayed chart of
the land below with notation of the battle line--such battle line as
still existed--corrected up to the last hour by photographs and
visual observations made by other pilots that morning. It was the
strip of ravaged and restored land over which he was flying; clearly
he could see the cross-streaked spots of the cities; on his right,
Ham; on his left, Péronne and Roisel. Roads spider-webbed about
them; tiny villages clustered. Immediately below he could see even,
decent patches of planted fields, gardens, meadows; he could make
out, too, more minute objects--the peasants’ cottages and their
trees, the tiny roofs of the new portable houses supplied by the
Americans.

He could see the specks which were people upon the roads, gathered
in groups moving together; where the specks formed into a long,
ordered line, he knew that they were troops and moving toward the
battle, probably. He himself was flying so fast that the direction
of the slow movement upon the roads could not appear; but he could
guess that the irregular series of specks were refugees in flight.
Shells were smashing beside them--shrapnel, high explosive, and gas.
He could recognize easily the puff of the shrapnel distinct from the
burst of the high explosive shells. He could not distinguish the gas
shells; but he knew that the Germans were using them, deluging with
gas the zone behind the battle to a depth unknown before.

He gazed forward to the ground where the German infantry now was
advancing--ground sloping so slightly hereabouts that, but for the
shadows, it would have seemed flat. But the morning sun of March was
still circling low, making all bright a strip where shells, in
enormous number, erupted; just short of this strip, the sunlight
ceased sharply in a shadow which did not move; the bright strip
therefore was the eastern slope of a hill and the shadow was its
western descent--a slope where, at this moment, the English must be
attempting a stand.

Gerry gazed to the right to try to find and, with his eyes, follow
the line which ran from this hill; but he could discover none; he
glanced to the left and failed there also to discern support for the
English soldiers on the hill. Surely there must have been support of
some sort thereabouts; but the Germans had overwhelmed or swept it
back. Germans--German infantry in mass, Germans deployed, German
guns engaged and German guns moving forward followed by their
trains--Germans possessed the ground before that sunlit slope and on
its right and left.

He looked farther away to the south and to the north; and he could
witness the truth which already he had been told. The “line,” in the
sense in which one had known the line for three years, was swept
away--first, second, third, and all supporting systems of defense;
attempts to form new lines behind the old had failed. Open field
battle, swift and Napoleonic, was established; for this battle the
Germans had gathered men by the hundred thousands, guns by the
thousand while the English here had--well, the remnants of brigades
and divisions which here and there held to the slope of a hill.

Gerry wondered, as he gazed down, whether these men on the nearest
slope knew that--already half surrounded--there was no support
behind them. He was steering lower as he neared them, drawing to
himself a shell or two from some German anti-aircraft gun which he
did not trouble to try to place. Airplanes appeared all about him
now, above, before, behind, and on both sides; but they were, most
of them, English or French; here and there he glimpsed a German
machine; but none of these approached him to attack. For if the
ground that morning was the Germans’, the air was the allies’; it
was only from the air, from him and his flight of five machines
trailing behind him and from other similar flights of fighting
airplanes likewise arriving, that any help could reach those English
about to be attacked.

For the storm of German shells, which a few seconds before had been
sweeping the slope, lifted suddenly; before the hill and from the
flank, specks which were German storm troops moved forward; and
Gerry, turning his head, saw that the other machines followed him in
position. In signal to them, he rocked his ship a little. Steadying
again, he leaned forward and saw that his machine guns were ready;
softly he touched the release levers of his bombs. His hands went
back to his controls and, gazing below at the German ranks again, he
put the nose of his machine down and dived.

Ordinarily, during the tremendous seconds of the drop, he could see
nothing but the spot of earth at which his eyes were focused,
leaping up and up at him; ordinarily, sensation stopped with the
feeling of fall and the rush of that seeming suck of destruction.
But now his senses took in many things. His eyes never lost the
swelling specks of gray which were becoming German storm troops
leaping to the attack; but his eyes took in, too, the file of forms
in English brown lying waiting over the crest of the hill.

They were scattered and few--very, very few, he saw; fewer even than
he had feared when he gazed down upon them from two thousand feet
higher. He had counted the forms of the dead among the holders of
the hill; he could not, in that flash of vision, see that the many,
many were dead; he could see only that, as he dropped down above
them, few of the forms were moving. They were drawing together in
little groups with bayonets flashing in the sunshine, drawing
together in tens and scores and half hundreds for last desperate
defense of the hill against the thousands coming to take it.

The puffing jets of German machine-gun fire, enfilading the hill
from the right and from the left, shone over the ground in the
morning sunshine where German machine gunners had worked their way
about to fire in front of their charging troops; Gerry saw no such
jets from the hill, though the charging men in gray must be in plain
sight and within point-blank range at that instant from the English
on the hill. The English were short of ammunition, that meant.




CHAPTER XI: THE RESISTANCE


But the English were going to fight.

This knowledge came to Gerry through the rush and suck of the final
yards of his three thousand foot fall; mechanically, automatically
his hands were tugging at his controls, his feet braced firm on his
rudder bar as he began to bring his machine out of the fall. He had
come down at terrific speed with his motor only partly shut off; he
had no time, and no need, to watch his speed indicator; he knew well
enough when he was on edge of the breaking strain which his wings
and wires could stand. He slanted more directly toward the Germans
and he was very low above the ground; still half falling, half
flying--and at greater speed than ever he could have flown--he
hurled himself at them, flattening out at perhaps fifty feet from
the earth.

He knew--not from anything which he consciously saw nor from any
conscious reckoning but by the automatism of realization and the
reflex from it which guided and coordinated his mind, nerve, and
muscle in these terrific instants of attack--he knew that German
machine gunners were firing at him; he knew that German riflemen in
the ranks which he was charging were giving him bursts of bullets as
fast as they could fire; and his fingers which so tenderly had
touched the release levers of his bombs, pulled them positively now;
with his other hand, which held to the control stick, he had
gathered the lanyard which governed his machine gun; he had adjusted
it so that the slightest tug would get the guns going; he gave that
tug and the reassuring, familiar _jet-jet_ of his guns firing
through his airscrew combined with the burst of his bombs below and
behind.

His fingers went from his bomb levers to his throttle to open it
wider; the detonations which had followed him ceased; his hand flew
back to his lever and the bursts began again. All the time his hand
on the control stick kept tension on the gun lanyards; ceaselessly
those jets from his machine gun projected through the whorl of his
airscrew.

He was killing men. He could see them, not as he killed them, but
some infinitesimal of a second before; very possibly, indeed, the
bullets out of those jets of his machine guns already had pierced
the white flashes under the helmets which were faces of Germans
gazing up at him or had riddled through the gray bulks of their
bodies. But blood had not time to spot to the surface; the shock of
the bullets, even when they immediately killed, had not time to
dissolve the tautness of those bodies and relax them and let them
down before Gerry was flown over them and was gone. He had taken
position, when high in the sky a few seconds earlier, so as to sweep
the length of the waves of the Germans charging; and though the
swiftness of this sweep forbade him from seeing the results, he knew
that with his machine guns alone he was taking off many; and though
he could not now look back at all, he knew that his bombs, dropped
from so close, must be killing many, many more.

The Germans attested to that; they scattered and scurried before
him; he had no row of gray forms for his target now; to save his
cartridges, he had to stop that steady pull on his lanyard; he
pursued groups, firing short bursts of bullets till they broke and
scattered again. He was not fighting alone, of course; the machines
in his flight all had followed him down. He outflew the men on the
ground and, rising while he turned, he got view of the field over
which he had swept; two of his machines which had followed him, were
rising already; the others were still flying low, attacking with
machine guns and bombs; and below them, that line of the German
attack was halted and broken. He could see spaces where his bombs
had exploded or where the machine-gun fire from the airplanes had
been most effective and gray-clad forms strewed the ground; between
these spots, German officers were reforming ranks and getting men
together again. Gerry opened his throttle wide and, circling,
climbed a little more; and then, he dove again and gave it to these
gathering men.

Gave them machine-gun fire alone, now; for his bombs were gone. He
could see the work of the bombs better, and sight of that work
brought him grim exultation. He was glad that this morning he was no
mere duelist of the sky, darting and feinting and dashing in,
spinning about and diving high in the heavens to shoot down just one
enemy; here he had led an attack which had killed or disabled
hundreds. This was no day to glory in single combat.

He had overflown again the men on the ground and, climbing once
more, he got view of the crest of the slope. It was gray! Gray-clad
men were swarming all over it; gray--Germans! Brown men battled
them; bayonets glinted in the sun; the brown men dropped; gray men
toppled, too; but there were more of the gray all about. How they
had got up there, Gerry could not tell; they might be some of those
in the waves at which he had fired and who had gone on; they might
be a different battalion which had charged in from the flank. They
were there; they had taken the hill; they were slaying the last of
the English. Gerry saw the swirls of the brown and gray where a few
survivors, surrounded, were fighting hand to hand to the last. He
forced down the nose of his machine and dropped at them; he let go
one burst of bullets into the gray; let go another and now, as he
pulled on his lanyard, the airscrew before him whirled clear; the
jets did not project through it; his machine guns were silent; their
ammunition was spent.

He had a mad impulse, when he realized this, to swerve lower and
make himself and his machine a mighty projectile to scythe those
German heads with the edges of his wings; he could kill--he was
calculating, in one of those flashes which consume no reckonable
time, the number of gray men he could hope to kill. Ten or a dozen,
at most; and he had just slain--and therefore again that day might
slay--a hundred. But that instinct did not decide him. Among the
gray men, in the only groups upon which he could thus drop, were
brown men, so with his free hand he pulled out his automatic pistol
and, as he flew barely above the helmets of the men in the mêlée, he
emptied the magazine.

English soldiers glanced up at him; ten feet below him were English
boys, doomed, surrounded but fighting. It struck shame through Gerry
the next moment when he was rising clear and safe that a few seconds
before he could have been almost within hand reach of those English
boys fighting to the end on the ground; that, indeed, he had for a
moment fought with them and then he had deserted them to their death
while he had flown free. He looked back, half banking his machine
about; but already the battle upon that hill crest was over; the
last of the English were killed. Gerry could return only to avenge
them; and the way to avenge was with refilled bomb racks and
machine-gun magazines.

That dive to the top of the hill had separated him from the other
machines in his flight except one which was following him on his
return to the airdrome for ammunition and bombs. Gerry, gazing down,
found disorganization more visible than when he had flown to the
front. He could see the English troops, whom he had viewed advancing
upon the roads, spreading out and forming a line of resistance; but
he could better realize how few these English were for the needs of
this mighty emergency. They were taking positions, not with any
possible hope of holding them against the German masses but only
with determination to fight to delay the enemy a little as Gerry had
just seen some of them fight.

He sighted his field and he swooped down upon it, leaping out as
soon as he stopped. He saw that, as he had suspected, rifle or
machine-gun bullets had gone through his wings; but they had not
pierced spars or struts; his wires were tight. While men refilled
his bomb racks and magazines and gave him fuel, he reported what he
had seen and received new orders.

His superiors recognized that the disaster, instead of lessening,
was growing greater each hour. Powerful French and English reserves
were on the way but they were still distant; meanwhile the local
reserves were being used up. The English were gathering together and
throwing in anyone and everyone to try to delay the German advance;
there were kilometers where only this scratch army offered
resistance--sutlers, supply men, and cooks armed with rifles and
machine guns fighting beside Chinese coolies impressed into a
fighting line.

Gerry passed a word with an English pilot whom he knew well and who
was just back from over another part of the battle field.

“Hello, Hull! Your people rather getting into it over my way!”

“Who? How?” Gerry called.

“One of your engineer regiments were working behind the lines; line
came back on ’em. They grabbed guns and went in and gave it to the
Huns! Should have seen ’em. Can yet; they’re keeping at it.”

The blood tingled hotter in Gerry’s veins; his people were fighting!
His countrymen, other than the few who from the first had been
fighting in the foreign legion or scattered in Canadian regiments or
here and there in the flying forces, were having part in this
battle! No great part, at that; and only an accidental part. Simply
a regiment of American engineers, who had been on construction work
for the British Fifth Army, had thrown down their shovels and tools,
grabbed guns, and gone in.

“You’ve some good girls--some awfully good girls out that way, too!”
the English pilot cried.

Gerry was in his seat and starting his motor so he just heard that;
he rose from the field and for several moments all his conscious
attention was given to catching proper formation with the machines
returning along with him to the battle; but subconsciously his mind
was going to those girls, the American girls--those “awfully good”
girls out that way. He did not know what they might be doing this
day--what it was which won from the English pilot the praise in his
voice. Gerry had known that American girls had been out “that way,”
he had known about the Smith College girls, particularly--the score
or so who called themselves the Smith College Relief Unit and who,
he understood, had been supplying the poor peasants and looking
after old people and children and doing all sorts of practical and
useful things in little villages about Nesle and Ham. He did not
know any of those girls; but he did know Cynthia Gail; and now, as
he found himself in flight formation and flying evenly, thought of
her emerged more vividly than it had previously upon that morning.

When the news had reached him far away on the evening before that
the Germans had broken through in that neighborhood where she was,
he had visualized her in his fears as a helpless victim before the
enemy’s advance. The instincts she had stirred in him were to hurry
him to her protection; that morning as he had looked down upon the
refugees on the roads, mentally he had put her among the multitude
fleeing and to be defended. But the shout of the English pilot had
made Gerry think of her as one of those protecting--not precisely a
combatant, perhaps, but certainly no mere non-combatant.

Of course the English pilot had not mentioned Cynthia Gail; but
Gerry knew that if American girls were proving themselves that
morning, Cynthia Gail was one of them. He had been able, in vivid
moments, to see Agnes Ertyle; for he knew exactly what she would be
doing; but his imagination had failed to bring before him Cynthia
Gail. In the subconscious considerations which through the violence
of his physical actions dwelt on such ideas, this failure had seemed
proof that Agnes Ertyle alone stirred the deepest within him; but
now those visions of the unseen which came quite unbidden and which
he could not control showed him again and again the smooth-skinned,
well-formed face with the blue, brave eyes under thoughtful brows,
and the slender, rounded figure of the girl whom he knew as Cynthia
Gail. And whereas previously he had merely included her among the
many in peril, now dismay for her particularly throbbed through him.

Her words when they last were together--“A score or so of you felt
you had to do the fighting for a hundred million of us; but you
haven’t now, for we’re coming; a good many of us are here”--no
longer seemed a mere appeal to him to spare himself; it told him
that she was among those on the ground endeavoring to govern the
fate of this day.

He sighted, before and below, a road where German guns were being
rushed forward; dove down upon them, leading his flight again and
bombed the guns, machine-gunned the artillerymen; he bombed a supply
train of motor lorries; he flew over and machine-gunned two motor
cars with German officers and saw one of the cars overturn. But
German combat pilots were appearing in force all about; Gerry gazed
up and saw a big, black-crossed two-seater accompanied by two
single-seaters maneuvering to dive down upon him.

He swerved off, therefore, and fled. For a moment he longed for his
swift-darting little Spad instead of this heavier ship which bore
bombs in addition to machine guns. But the Spads of his comrades and
English combat machines appeared; and the German pilots above did
not dare to dive. They circled, awaiting reinforcement which swiftly
came--triplane Fokkers mostly, Gerry thought. As he watched them, he
forgot all about the ground; for the French and the English pilots,
ten thousand feet above him, were starting an attack. He circled and
climbed a few thousand feet; he knew that with his heavy raiding
machine, he could not join that battle. But heavy German
airplanes--for observation, for photographic work, or to guide the
advancing German guns--were appearing in the lower levels and
slipping forward under the protection of the Fokkers and the
Albatrosses. Gerry went for one of these and turned it back; he went
for another--a two-seater--and he saw the German machine gunner fall
forward; he saw the pilot’s hooded head drop; he saw flame flash
from the gasoline tank; the two-seater tumbled and went down.

He dared not follow it with his eyes even for the short seconds of
its fall; machines from the battle above were coming down where he
was. A Fokker dropped, turning over and over to escape a Spad which
came down on its tail and got it anyway; now a Spad streaked past in
flame. A two-seater--a German machine marked by the big black
crosses under its wings--glided slowly down in a volplane. Gerry
circled up to it, approaching from the side with the lanyard of his
machine guns ready; but the German pilot raised an arm to signal
helplessness. His gunner was dead across his guns; his engine was
gone; he had kept control enough only to glide; and he was gliding,
Gerry saw, with the sun on his right. That meant he was making for
German-held ground. He came beside the gliding two-seater,
therefore, and signaled to the west. The German obeyed and, while
Gerry followed, he glided to the field in the west and landed.

Gerry came down beside him and took the pilot prisoner; together
they lifted the body of the German observer from his seat and laid
him on the ground. Gerry possessed himself of the German’s maps and
papers.

The German pilot, who was about Gerry’s own age, had been a little
dazed from the fight in the sky; but Gerry discovered that his
willingness to surrender and the fact that he had made no attempt to
destroy his own machine upon landing was from belief that they had
come down upon ground already gained by the Germans. Whether or not
that was true, at least it appeared to be ground already abandoned
by the English. Certainly no considerable English force existed
between that position and the Germans whom Gerry had seen advancing
two miles away. No batteries were in action nearby; the airplanes
seemed to be standing in an oasis of battle. There was a road a
couple of hundred yards to the south, and, seeing travel upon it,
Gerry took his prisoner in that direction.

He found refugees upon the road--patient, pitiful families of French
peasants in flight, aiding one another and bearing poor bundles of
their most precious possessions. The sight brought Gerry back to his
first days of the war and to the feelings of the boy he had been in
August, 1914, when he rushed across the channel from England to
offer himself to the Red Cross in France and when he met the first
refugees fleeing before von Klück’s army out of Belgium and
Normandy. He had seen nothing like this in France since then; and
the years of war had not calloused him to these consequences.
Indeed, they had brought to him more terrible realizations than the
horror-struck boy of 1914 had been able to imagine. So these again
were to be visited upon France! And because his people had watched
for almost three years, had kept safely out!

His prisoner now turned to Gerry and spoke to him in French.

“It appears,” he corrected the error he had made when Gerry had
taken him, “that you are not my prisoner yet.”

“No,” Gerry said. “Not yet.”

A Ford truck passed the farm wains and the miserable column of
marchers. The driver, Gerry saw, was in khaki and was a girl. She
observed him and drew up.

“Hello,” she hailed alertly, taking in the situation at a glance.
“Do you want to get rid of your prisoner?”

She was American--one of those “awfully good” girls of whom the
English had told him! And, seeing her and hearing her voice, he knew
what the English pilot had meant; and a bit of pride--tingling,
burning pride for his people--flared up where the moment before had
been only condemnation and despair. For this girl was no mere
driver; she was in charge of the French--a cool, clear-headed
competent commander of these foreign peasants from a village
evacuated under her direction. She had, lying in the hay upon the
floor of the truck, children injured by shell fire and English
wounded whom she had found by the road. She had been under fire;
and, as soon as she could get these people a little farther to the
rear, she was going back under fire to guide away more people. She
was entirely unheroic about it; why, that was the best thing she
could do this day. Did he know something better for her to do?

“No,” Gerry said. “Are there many more American girls here?” he
asked, gazing toward the German advance.

“We’re each--or two of us together are taking a village to get the
people out,” the girl said; and she named, at Gerry’s request, some
of the girls and some of the villages.

“Do you know Cynthia Gail?” he asked.

“She was going back, the last I heard of her, to Mirevaux.”

Gerry jerked. “Mirevaux must be taken now.”

“I heard guns that way. That’s all I know,” the girl said. She raced
her engine; Gerry knew she must go on. He left his prisoner in
charge of a wounded English soldier who was able to walk and he
returned to the machines in the middle of the field. The captured
German airplane was too damaged to remove; so he set it afire and
mounted in his own.

The battle in the sky had moved off somewhere else long ago; neither
in the air nor upon the ground was there engagement near him. He was
without bombs but he still had machine-gun ammunition; he directed
his course as he rose into the air toward the hamlet of Mirevaux.

He could see it clearly from a few hundred feet in the sky--see
shells, which must be from German guns, smashing on a hillside on
the south and shells, which must be from an English battery,
breaking about Mirevaux. These told that the Germans indeed were in
the village and some force of English were maintaining themselves on
the hill. He observed a road west of Mirevaux upon which appeared
such a procession as that to which he had entrusted his prisoner.
The English position, which the Germans were shelling, flanked this
road and partially protected it; but Gerry could observe strong
detachments, which must be German patrols, working about the English
to the northwest and toward the road.

The English could not see them; nor could the refugees on the road
catch sight of them. Gerry sighted a small, black motor car moving
with the processions. Another American girl was driving that,
probably; or at least an American girl was somewhere down there--a
girl with even, blue eyes which looked honestly and thoughtfully
into one’s, a girl with glorious hair which one liked to watch in
the sunlight and which tempted one to touch it, a girl with soft,
round little shoulders which he had grasped, a girl who had gone
into the sea for him, and whom he had carried, warm in his arms.

A couple of German 77s began puffing shrapnel up about Gerry; for he
was flying low and toward them. But he went lower and nearer and
directly at that patrol. Gerry could see that they were working
nearer the road, with plenty of time to intercept that procession
from Mirevaux; and, though he gave those German guns a perfect
target for a few seconds, he dove down upon the patrol. They were
Jaegers, he thought, as he began to machine-gun them--the sort whom
the Germans liked to put in their advance parties and who had made
their first record in Belgium. Gerry thought of those Jaegers, with
the blood fury of battle hot on them, intercepting that blue-eyed
girl; and when he had overflown them, he swung back and gave it to
them again.

One of the machine guns which had been firing at him from the ground
or some of the shrapnel from the German 77s had got him, now; for
his ship was drooping on the left; the wings had lost their lift.
When he had overflown the patrol the second time and tried to turn
back, he could not get around; his controls failed. The best he
could do was to half pull up into the wind and, picking a fairly
flat place below, to come down crashing that drooping left wing,
crashing the undercarriage, crashing struts and spars and tangling
himself in wires and bracing cables but missing, somehow, being
hurled upon the engine. He was alive and not very much hurt, though
enmeshed helplessly in the maze of the wreck; and the German gunners
of the 77s either guessed he might be alive or it was their habit to
make sure of every allied airplane which crashed within range, for a
shell smashed thirty yards up the slope beyond him.

Gerry, unable to extricate himself, crouched below the engine and
the sheathing of the fuselage; a second shell smashed closer; a
third followed. Gerry felt blood flowing inside his clothes and he
knew that he had been hit. But now the German gunner was satisfied
or had other targets for his shells; at any rate, the shells ceased.
Gerry was about a mile away from the gun, he figured; he had flown
perhaps half a mile beyond the Jaeger patrols when he came down. The
road, upon which he had seen the travel, ran just on the other side
of a slope upon which he lay; he could see a stretch of it before it
passed behind the rise of ground and he noticed a black motor
car--possibly the same which he had seen from overhead a few minutes
before--drive toward him. He saw the car halt and a khaki-clad
figure get down from the driver’s seat; it was a skirted figure and
small beside the car; it was a girl!

The German gunner, who had been giving Gerry attention, also saw the
car; and, evidently, he had the range of that visible stretch of the
road. A shell smashed close; and Gerry saw the girl leap back to her
seat and run the car on while a second shell followed it. The rise
hid the car from Gerry and, also, from the German gunners, for again
the shelling shifted.

The next shell smashed on the other side of the slope where the road
again came into sight; the car had not yet reached that part of the
road, so Gerry knew that the German artillerymen were merely
“registering” the road to be ready when the car should run into the
open. But the car did not appear; instead, the girl crept about the
side of the slope and advanced toward Gerry. She had lost her hat
and the sun glowed and glinted upon glorious yellow hair. The
pointer of the 77 did not see her or he disregarded her while he
waited for the car to appear on the registered stretch of the road;
but a machine gunner with the Jaegers got sight and opened upon the
slope. Gerry could see the spurt of the bullets in the dry dust of
the planted field; the girl instantly recognized she was fired at
and she sprang sidewise and came forward.

“Go back!” Gerry called. “Keep away!”

She stumbled and rolled and Gerry gasped, sure that she was hit; but
she regained her feet instantly and, crouching, ran in behind him.
Her hands--those slender, soft but strong little hands which he had
first touched in Mrs. Corliss’ conservatory weeks ago--grasped him
and held him.

“Keep down,” Gerry begged of her. “Keep down behind the engine!”

“You!” she murmured to him. “I thought when I saw you in the air and
when you fought them so, that it might be you! Where are you hurt;
oh, how much?”

“Not much; I don’t know where, exactly. Keep down behind the engine,
Cynthia!”

She was not hurt at all, he saw; and though the tangle of wires
enmeshed his legs, he was able to turn about and seize her and press
her down lower. For the machine gunner was spraying the wreck of the
airplane now. She was working with her strong little hands, trying
to untwist and unloop the wires to get him free when Gerry heard the
motor noises of an airplane, descending. He gazed up and saw a
German machine swooping a thousand feet above the ground. The pilot
passed over them and, diving, came back five hundred feet lower; he
took another look, circled and returned barely a hundred yards up.
This time he would fire, Gerry knew; and it was impossible to find
shield at the same time against the flying machine gun and the gun
of the Jaegers. Gerry dragged his automatic from his holster and
aimed, not with any hope of hitting the German machine, but merely
to fire back when fired upon. But he could not twist himself far
enough.

“Give me the pistol,” he heard Cynthia say; and, as the German flyer
came upon them with his machine gun jetting, he let her hand take
the pistol; and while he lay enmeshed, helpless, he heard her
firing.

The machine-gun bullets from above splattered past them; the pilot
had overflown. The girl had emptied the magazine of Gerry’s pistol
and she demanded of him more cartridges. He took his pistol;
reloaded it and now, when she reclaimed it, she crouched beside him
and shot through a wooden strut and the wires which had been locking
his legs in the wreckage. He pulled himself free.

“Now let’s get out of here!” he bid.

“You’re all right?” she asked.

He was testing his legs. “All right,” he assured.

The Jaeger machine gunner had interrupted his fire; and the
airplane, which had attacked, was far away at this moment.

“I heard you were about here, Cynthia,” Gerry said. “That’s
why--when I had the chance--I came this way.”

She made no reply as she watched the road to the rear upon which the
refugees were appearing. A shell burst before them.

“I have to go to them!” Ruth cried.

“They’ll scatter; see; they’re doing it!” Gerry said, as the French
ran separately through the fields till the rise of ground guarded
them. “But we’d better skip now!”

He had removed his maps from his machine; warning her, he lit a
match and ignited the wreckage. The flame, bursting from the
gasoline, fed upon the varnished wing fabric, clouding up dense and
heavy smoke which drifted with the breeze and screened them as they
arose and, crouching, ran. The German machine gunner evidently
looked upon the fire as the result of his shots and suspected no
flight behind the smoke. The flyer, who had attacked, likewise
seemed to see the fire as the result of his bullets. He turned away
to other targets.

Gerry got Ruth, unhurt, to the crest of the slope; they slipped over
it and for the moment were safe. The car which Ruth had driven stood
in the road.




CHAPTER XII: “HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?”


The French peasants, who had been fired upon and had gained the
protection of the slope, gathered about them.

“Beyond, also, the road is open to fire,” Gerry informed them in
French; and he directed them to proceed in little groups and by the
fields away from the road.

“Monsieur le Lieutenant is wounded,” an old man observed
solicitously.

“Barely at all,” Gerry denied; but swayed as he said so.

“Your car must go by the road,” Gerry said to Ruth. “You go with
them in the fields; I will take it on for a bit.”

He meant to relieve her for the run over the exposed stretch. He
tried to step up to the driver’s seat; but his leg would not bear
his weight and he fell backward and would have gone to the ground
had Ruth not caught him.

“That’s simply a knee twist from being bent under my ship,” he
asserted. “That shrap hardly scratched me,” he referred to the red
spot on his side where her fingers were feeling.

“Help me lift Monsieur le Lieutenant,” Ruth bid the old peasant.
Gerry tried again to climb alone; but his leg had quite given away.
As they lifted, he pulled himself into the seat and took the wheel.

“You need both feet for the pedals,” Ruth reminded him, simply; and
he moved over without further protest and let her drive. The car was
a covered Ford truck and Gerry, gazing back, saw an old French
woman, a child, and two men, who had been injured, lying upon the
bedding over the floor. The car was coming to the section of road
which the German gunner had registered and Gerry turned about and
watched Ruth while she drove.

He had never seen her doing anything like this before; and the sight
of her small, white hands, so steady and firm on the wheel, her
little, slender, booted feet upon the pedals sent a thrill tingling
through him. He was a little dizzy for a moment and he closed his
eyes, clutching to the side of his seat. A shell smashed twenty
yards before them; parts of it hit the car. The shock of it startled
Gerry up; but the girl beside him was not hit nor frightened.
Swiftly she swerved the car to dodge the hole in the road where the
gravel was still slipping and settling; the next shell was behind
and while they fled now, the shells all were behind and farther and
farther back till they ceased.

Ruth halted her car and waited for her charges to gather on the
road; all of them appeared; none of them had been hurt. The damage
done by the German fire totaled a front wheel much bent and the
radiator ruined.

“We’ll have to run hot,” Ruth said. “We can get on, if we go
slowly.”

Gerry attempted to get down to walk; but his twisted left knee would
not bear him at all. His idea had been to return at once, somehow,
to the battle, as soon as this girl who had come to him was in some
sort of safety. He had planned wildly, to attempt to join the
English fighting to the south of Mirevaux. He couldn’t do that now;
but, with strength enough in his leg to move a rudder bar, he could
fly and fight again as soon as he could procure another “ship.” The
only way he could reach the rear and another airplane was to
continue with these refugees and with this girl.

It was strange that when he had been fighting and had been far from
her, he had felt more strongly about her than he did now--more about
her as a girl, that was, in relation to him as a man. He was close
beside her with her body swaying against his when the car careened
in the pits and ruts of the road. He kept observing her--the play of
color in her smooth skin in the flush of her excitement, the steady,
blue eyes alert upon the road, her full, red little lips pressing
tight together after speaking with him and drawing tiny lines of
strain at the corners of her mouth. He noticed pretty things about
her which he had not before--the trimness of her ankles even under
her heavy boots, the ease with which that slender, well-formed
little body exerted its strength, the way her hair at her temples
went into ringlets when effort and anxiety moistened her forehead.
But he noticed these as though to remember them later; his thought
seemed to store them and save them for feeling at another time; he
was almost aware of going through an experience with her which could
affect him, fully, only afterwards. In the same manner that
subconsciously he had thought about her when all his conscious
thought was absorbed in flying and fighting, now his eyes only
observed her; his soul was blent in the battle.

He and she, and the rest, were going back--back, kilometer after
kilometer and yet encountering no strong force of English or French
in position to hold that land; and he knew that if that depth of
front was being abandoned as far away to the right and as far away
to the left as he could see, resistance must have broken down over a
much greater front. Indeed, Gerry had himself observed from his
airplane something of the length of the line where the allies were
retreating; but he had not been able, when in the air, and passing
in a few seconds over a kilometer, to feel the disaster as now he
felt it in the swaying seat of the half-wrecked truck creeping along
at the head of a column of refugees. This land which the Germans
were again overrunning in a day was the strip which the English had
freed the year before only through the long, murderous months of the
“blood baths” of the Somme.

“Do you remember an English officer on the _Ribot_,” Ruth was asking
of him, “whom I called ‘1582?’”

“He’s about here?” Gerry inquired.

“No; but several of his sort are--one particularly, a Lieutenant
Haddon-Staples; I called him, to myself, ‘1583.’”

“What do you think of his sort now?” Gerry asked, confidently.

Ruth’s eyes filled suddenly so that she had to raise a hand from the
driving-wheel to dash away the wetness which blurred the road.

“They’re the most wonderful sportsmen in the world!” Ruth said.
“They don’t care about odds against them; or at least they don’t
complain. Oh, that’s not the word; complaint is about as far from
their attitude as anything you can think of.”

“I know,” Gerry said.

“They don’t even--criticize. They just accept the odds, whatever
they are; and go in with all of themselves as though they had a
chance to hold and win and come out alive! They know they haven’t;
but you’d never guess it from them; and there’s none of that ‘We who
are about to die salute you’ idea in them either. They’re sportsmen
and gentlemen!”

“I know how they make you feel,” Gerry said, watching her keenly
again; the road thereabouts was bad and she couldn’t even glance
around to him. “Rather, you know now how they made me feel, I
think.”

She made no reply; so he went on. “If they’d say things out to us;
if they had criticized us and damned us and told us we were lying
down behind them, it wouldn’t be so rotten hard to see them. But
they don’t. They just go in as you say; they feel they’ve a fight on
which is their fight and they’re going to fight it whether anyone
else thinks it worth while to fight it or not or whether they have
any chance for winning.”

Ruth winked swiftly again to clear her eyes; and Gerry, watching
her, wondered what particular experience his general praise had
called up. He did not ask; but she told him.

“‘1583’ was just that sort of man, Gerry,” she said, using his name
for the first time as simply as he had spoken hers when she had
crouched behind the shield of his engine with him.

“He’s killed?” Gerry asked.

“I don’t know; but it’s certain--yes, he’s killed,” she replied.

“You--cared for him, Cynthia?”

“He was about here--I mean about Mirevaux--as long as I’ve been.
That was only two weeks--‘a fortnight,’ as he’d say in his funny,
English way--but now it seems----”

“I know,” Gerry said.

“He was with his battalion which was lying in reserve. He and some
of the others didn’t have a lot to do evenings so they’d drop in
pretty often at the cottage Mrs. Mayhew and I had where there was
one of those little, portable organs with three octaves and we’d
play their songs sometimes and ours--like _Good King Wenceslaus_ and
_Clementine_.”

“Did you play?” Gerry interrupted.

“Sometimes; and sometimes he would; and we’d all sing,

    In the cabin, in the cañon,
    Excavating for a mine;
    Dwelt a miner, forty-niner--

All the English liked that sort best with _Wait for the Wagon_, you
know.”

“Yes.”

It was a minute or two before she continued; she was speaking of
evenings none of them older than two weeks and one of them only the
night before last; but they formed part of an experience irrevocable
now and of an epoch past.

“They knew pretty well what was going to happen to them--that they
would have to be thrown in some day without a chance. But they
talked about coming to America after the war--the mining camps of
Nevada and California, the Grand Cañon, Niagara Falls, and Mammoth
Cave appealed to them, particularly. I asked ‘1583’ once--I knew him
best,” Ruth said; and when she repeated the nickname for him it was
with the wistful fondness with which only such a name may be said,
“if he didn’t want to go back home to England and Suffolkshire after
the war. He said, ‘I’m eager to stay a bit with the pater and the
mater, naturally.’” She was imitating his voice; and Gerry saw that
it made her cry; but she went on. “‘But I can’t stay there, you
know.’

“I asked, why.

“‘My friends,’ he said. ‘I’ve not one now. You fancy you’re attached
to a place; but you find, you know, you’ve cared for more than
that.’ Then he changed the subject the way the English always do
when you come to something they feel. He was with me the evening
this battle began; and he knew what was coming. I didn’t see him
again till this morning--early this morning,” she repeated as though
unable to believe the shortness of the time. “He rode over to warn
us; and then, a little later when I was getting my first party of
people out of Mirevaux, I passed him with some more men just like
him going to the firing. He knew he was going to be killed for he’d
told us the Germans had broken through; and we couldn’t hold them.
But he wasn’t thinking about that when he saw me. He just watched me
as I was working to get my people in order and, as he rode past, he
called out, ‘Good old America!’ That to me--one girl getting
peasants out of a village while he and his handful of soldiers were
going--there!” Ruth gestured back toward the battle. “Oh, I wanted
to be a million men for him--for them! ‘Good old America!’ he said.
I saw him, or men whom I think he was with, holding a hill a couple
of miles east an hour later; they were one to ten or one to twenty;
I don’t know what the odds were against them; but they stayed on top
of that hill. I tell you I saw them--stay on top of that hill.”

“I know,” Gerry said. “I’ve seen them stay on top of a hill. I know
how it is to want to be, for them, a million men!”

Ruth’s hands on the steering-wheel went bloodless from pressure.
“Our million is coming; thank God, it’s coming! And I believe--I
must believe that somehow it still is right and best that we
couldn’t come before.” She gazed back over the land where the
Germans were advancing; and where the English soldiers were
“staying.”

“How could this happen, this break-through?” she asked. “It wasn’t
just superior numbers; they’ve had that and, at other times, we’ve
had superiority before; but no one ever advanced like this.”

“They showed an entirely new attack,” Gerry said. “New infantry
formation; new arms--infantry cannon; then there was the mist. And
our intelligence people must have fallen down, too, while theirs
gave them everything they wanted. We didn’t know at all what they
were going to do, but they must have known everything about our
strength, or lack of strength, here.”

He saw her hands whiten again with their grasp of the wheel and the
little lines deepen under her tight-drawn lips. She had stiffened as
though he had accused her; and while he was wondering why, she
glanced up at him.

“Then part of this--” her gaze had gone again to the fields being
abandoned--“is my fault, Gerry.”

That was all she said; but instantly he thought of her accusation of
De Trevenac and what she had told him in the little parlor on the
Rue des Saints Pères; and he was so certain that she was thinking of
it also that he asked:

“You mean you didn’t tell me all you knew about De Trevenac?”

“No; I told you everything I knew! Oh, I wouldn’t have held back any
of that. I mean, I haven’t done all I might; you see, I never
imagined anything like this could happen.”

“What might you have done, Cynthia?” he asked. He had said to her
that time in the parlor on the Rue des Saints Pères that she had
come to do more than mere relief work; but he had not consistently
thought of her as engaged in that more daring work against which he
had warned her.

“I got so wrapt up in the work at Mirevaux,” she said, avoiding
direct answer. “I thought it was all right to let myself just do
that for a while.”

“Whereas?” he challenged.

She leaned forward and turned the ignition switch, stopping the
motor which had been laboring and grinding grievously. “It must cool
off,” she said, leaping down upon the ground. She went about to the
back of the truck and Gerry heard her speaking in French to the
passengers behind him.

“Grand’mère Bergues,” she said when she returned beside Gerry, “lost
for a moment her twig of the tree. I had to find it for her.”

“Her twig of what tree?” Gerry asked.

“I forgot you didn’t know,” and Ruth told him of Grand’mère Bergues’
tree. “When I convinced her at last,” Ruth added, “that the Boche
had broken through and were coming again, she had a stroke; but even
so she would not let us carry her until I had brought her a twig of
the tree--a twig which was green, and budding, and had sap, though
last year the Boche called that tree destroyed. That now must be her
triumph.”

Ruth restarted the motor and, when they proceeded, Gerry sat without
inquiring again of what dangerous, indefinite business this girl was
going to do. While he watched her driving, a queer, pulling
sensation pulsed in his breast; it associated itself with a vision
of a young Englishman, who now undoubtedly was dead, standing behind
this girl while she played a little organ with three octaves and
they all sang. This was not jealousy, exactly; it was simply
recognition of a sort of fellowship which she could share which he
would have liked to have discovered himself. It suggested not
something more than he had had with Agnes Ertyle; but something
quite different and which he liked. He tried to imagine Agnes
playing, and singing _Clementine_, and _Wait for the Wagon_; and--he
couldn’t. He tried to imagine her crying because someone had called
to her, “Good old England”; and he couldn’t. Agnes cried over some
things--children who were brought to her and badly wounded boys who
died. But Agnes could have told him all that Cynthia had without any
emotion at all. Agnes would have told it quite differently, of
course.

They were coming in sight of a flying field. “Let me off here,
please,” Gerry asked when they were opposite it.

When Ruth stopped the car Gerry called for one of the old Frenchmen
to give him a shoulder and he stepped down. “You don’t need much leg
muscle to fly,” he assured Ruth when she observed him anxiously. “If
I can’t steal a ship over there, at least they’ll take care of me.”
He hesitated, looking up at her, unable simply to thank her for what
she had done.

“Where are you going?” he asked. During their drive they had
discussed various destinations for their party; but could decide
upon none. The final halting place must depend upon the military
situation, and nothing was more unsettled than that. But Gerry was
not referring now to the halting place of the whole party; he knew
that during the last minutes she had formed determinations which
would take her as soon as possible to her other tasks; and she
accepted that in her answer.

“I’m going to Montdidier--unless it seems better to make for Amiens;
then to Paris as soon as I can.”

“I see.” He gazed away and up in the air where machines with the
tricolor circle of the allies were flying; and hastily he offered
Ruth his hand. “Good-bye, Cynthia,” he said.

“Good-bye, Gerry.”

“Cynthia, when you’re in Paris you’ll stay there?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you do, where’ll you be?”

“Milicent’s kept our room in the _pension_ on the Rue des Saints
Pères. I’ll be with her again, I think.”

“All right! Look out for yourself!”

“You try to, too!”

She kept the car standing a few seconds longer watching him while,
with his arm about the old man’s shoulder, he hobbled toward the
flying field. Several minutes later, when she was far down the road,
she gazed back, and saw a combat biplane rise from the field with
what seemed to be particular impatience, and she imagined that he
was piloting that machine. She had passed now from the zone of the
broken front, where all the effort was to throw men--any number and
any sort of men--across the path of the victorious German advance to
the region of retreat, where every sinew and every sense was
strained in the attempt to get men, and guns, and supplies out of
the area of envelopment by the enemy. And dreadful and appalling as
it had been to witness men--too few men and unsupported--moving
forward to immolate themselves in hopeless effort to stay that
German advance, yet it had not been so terrible to Ruth as this
sight and sound of retreat. For the sound--the beat of feet upon the
road, the ceaseless tramp of retreating men, the rumble of guns and
combat trains going back, then the beat, beat, beat of the
retreat--continued into the darkness, when Ruth no longer could see
the road from the little house where she rested. All through the
night it continued till it seemed to Ruth, not something human, but
a cataclysm of nature flowing before a more mighty catastrophe which
no one and nothing could stop.

Whenever she awoke she heard it; and through the dreams which
harassed the heavy periods of her stupor of exhaustion which served
that night for sleep, that beat of the feet throbbed and throbbed.

Ruth reached Montdidier at noon of the next day. It was at
Montdidier, accordingly, that she first learned the true magnitude
of the disaster and first heard openly spoken what had been said
only in part before; and that was that the fate of France and of the
allied cause depended now upon the Americans. If they could not
quickly arrive in great force and if, having arrived, they proved
unable to fight on even terms with the Germans, all was lost. France
would not yet give up, in any case; England would hold on; but,
without America, they were beaten.

And during that day, and through the next, and the next, while Ruth
was unable to leave Montdidier, the disaster grew until it was known
that the British Fifth Army, as an organized force, had ceased to
exist and the Germans, in this single great stroke, had advanced
thirty-five miles and claimed the capture of thirteen hundred guns
and ninety thousand men.

On Monday, as the Germans yet advanced and moved on Montdidier, Ruth
was in a column of refugees again; she was obliged to abandon her
determined task for the duty of the moment offered to her hands. She
got to Compiègne and there was delayed. Roye, Noyon, Montdidier all
now were taken; and the wounded from that southern flank of the
salient which thrust west toward Amiens were coming back upon
Compiègne; and no man yet could say that the disaster was halted.

But Foch had come to the command.

Ruth had tried to learn from men who had returned from the region
where she had left Gerry Hull, what his fate might have been. She
knew that he had been flying and fighting again, for she read in one
of the bulletins which was being issued, that he had been cited in
the orders of the day for Monday; but she learned nothing at all
about him after that until the day after the announcement that all
allied armies were to be under the supreme command of General Foch.
It was Friday, eight days after that first Thursday morning of mist,
and surprise, and catastrophe; and still the Germans fought their
way forward; but for two days now the French had arrived, and were
present in force from Noyon to Moreuil, and for two days the gap
between the British and the French, which the German break-through
had opened, had been closed.

Gerry upon that day was detailed with a squadron whose airdrome had
been moved beyond Ribecourt; he had been flying daily, and had
fought an engagement that morning, and after returning from his
afternoon reconnaissance over Noyon he had been ordered to rest, as
the situation was becoming sufficiently stabilized to end the long
strain of his too constant flights. Accordingly, he left late in the
afternoon for Compiègne to look for the field hospital where Agnes
Ertyle would be at work. The original site of her tents had been far
within the zone which the Germans had retaken; and Gerry had heard
that she had done wonders during the moving of the wounded.

He found her on duty, as he knew she would be; she was a trifle
thinner than before, perhaps; her cool, firm hand clasped his just a
bit tensely; her calm, observant eyes were slightly brighter; but
she was in complete control of herself, as she always was, quite
unconfused--even when two nurses came at the same time for emergency
directions--and quite efficient.

After a while she was able to give him a little time alone; and they
sat in a tent and talked. Gerry had not seen her or heard from her
since the beginning of the battle, and he found her almost
overwhelmed with the completeness of the British defeat and the
destruction of the Fifth Army. She herself knew and her father, who
was dead, had been a close friend of the commanding officers who
were held responsible for the disaster; and together with the shock
of the defeat, went sympathy for them. They were being removed; and
even the English commander-in-chief no longer had supreme command of
his own men.

“It’s the greatest thing the allies have yet done--one command,”
Gerry said. “We ought to have had it long ago; if we had, the Boche
never would have done what they just have. When you had your own
army and your own command, and the French had theirs, you each kept
your own reserve; and, of course, Ludendorf knew it. Haig expected
an attack upon his part of the front, so he had to keep his reserve
to himself on his part of the line to be ready for it; the French
looked for an attack on their sectors, so they kept their reserves
to themselves; so wherever Ludendorf struck with all his reserves,
he knew he’d meet only half of ours and that it would take five
days--as it did--for the other half to come up. Now one
commander-in-chief, like Foch, can stop all that.”

“I can believe it was necessary and, therefore, best,” Lady Agnes
said. “Yet I can’t stop being sorry--not merely for our general
officers, but for our men, too. Poor chaps who come to me; they’ve
fought so finely for England; and now the Boche are boasting they’ve
whipped them and beaten England. They everyone of them are so eager
to get well, and go back, and have at them again, and rather show
the Boche that they’ve not--rather show them that England will have
them! Now we’ll not be under our own command; yet we’ll be fighting
just the same for England; the Boche shall find that England will
have them!”

“You’ll have them!” Gerry assured. “And far quicker than you could
have before.”

Lady Agnes observed him, a little puzzled. “You used to say ‘we’
when you spoke of us,” she said gently.

Gerry flushed. “I was in your army then,” he replied.

“You’re fighting with us now--wonderfully, Gerry.”

“Yes; but technically you see, Agnes, I’m with my own forces.”

He said “my own” with a tone of distinction which surprised himself.
His own forces, except for a few comrade pilots, and for those
engineers who had grabbed rifles, and got into this battle, and
except for those girls--those “awfully good” girls of Picardy--still
were only in training in France or holding down quiet sectors in
Lorraine. But Gerry had been in one of those sectors which had not
been so noted for its tranquillity after “his own” forces had
arrived.

However, he was not thinking of those forces just then; he was
recalling an American girl who had come to him across open ground in
the sunlight and under machine-gun fire. For a moment he visualized
her as she stumbled and rolled forward, when he thought she was hit;
then he saw her close beside him with the sun on her glorious hair
and her eyes all anxious for him. Words of hers came to him when
Lady Agnes was speaking again her regret that the English could not
have kept their own command.

“Oh, I don’t know how to say it!” that American girl’s words
repeated themselves to Gerry; she was in a yellow dress now, with
bare arms and neck, and quite warm and flushed with her intentness
to explain to him something he could not understand at all. “But at
first France was fighting as France and for France against Germany;
and England, for England, was doing the same. And America couldn’t
do that--I mean fight for America. She couldn’t join with allies who
were fighting for themselves, or even for each other. The side of
the allies had to become more than that before we could go in; and
it is and we’re in!”

Gerry was understanding that better, now. This unification of the
command, and the yielding of the British was their greatest earnest
of that change which Cynthia Gail had felt before, and gloried in,
and which Agnes Ertyle accepted but yet deplored.

More wounded came streaming back from the battle and Lady Agnes
returned to duty immediately. “That Miss Gail, who was on the Ribot
with us, was in Compiègne the other day,” Agnes told him when he was
saying good-bye. “She’s doing marvels in sorting out refugees, I
hear.”

Gerry had been wondering often during the last days about what might
have happened to Cynthia; and he had inquired of several people. But
he had not thought that Lady Agnes might know.

“She was working at a relief headquarters on Rue Solférino, near the
Place de l’Hôtel de Ville.”

Gerry wandered into Compiègne, finding the Rue Solférino, which was
the main street of the city, more crowded and congested than ever
before. From the throng before the doors, Gerry quickly located the
quarters near the Hôtel de Ville where Cynthia Gail had been working
and, forcing a way in, he spied a yellow head bent over a little boy
and he heard a gentle, sweet voice speaking, in newly learned
French, interrogations about where the child last had seen his
mother, whether he had aunt or uncle and so on. Gerry went farther
in and made himself known; and when the girl looked up and saw him,
an older American woman--Mrs. Mayhew--looked up, and she observed
not only Gerry but the girl also.

“Hello,” Ruth said. It was a poor word to encompass all she was
feeling at that moment, which was, first, joy and relief that he was
safe; next, that he had come there to seek her. But the word did, as
it many, many times had done before; and he used the same to
encompass what he felt. “Have you had anything to eat tonight?” he
added after his greeting. He suspected not.

“I’ll have supper later, thanks,” Ruth said.

“You will not,” Mrs. Mayhew put in. “You can come back after supper,
if you must; but you go out now. Take her with you, Gerry.”

Which was a command which Gerry obeyed. So they sat together at a
little table in a café, much crowded, and very noisy, and where they
supped in haste; for there was a great multitude to be served. But
they were very light-hearted.

“You’ve heard the great news about our army?” Ruth asked.

“That we’re going to be under the command of General Foch like the
English?”

“Better than that,” Ruth said. “General Pershing has offered all our
forces to the French to use in any way they wish. He’s offered to
break up our brigades, or even our regiments and companies, and let
the French and English brigade our regiments with them, or take our
men as individuals into their ranks, or use us any way they want,
which will help to win. They’re not to think about us--our pride--at
all. They’re just to take us--in any way to help.”

“No,” said Gerry. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“It’s just announced,” Ruth told him. “I’d just heard. He did it
under the instructions and with the approval of our government. I
think--I think it’s the finest, most unselfish offer a nation ever
made! All we have in any way that’s best for the cause!”

Gerry sat back while hot rills of prickling blood tingled to his
temples. “I think so, too, Cynthia,” he said. And again that evening
words of hers, spoken long ago, seized him. “Oh, I don’t know how or
when it will appear; but I know that before long you will be prouder
to be an American than you ever dreamed you could be!”

Part of that pride was coming to him, then, incredible as it would
have seemed to him even a few days ago, when in the midst of
disaster unparalleled and due to the tardiness of his country. For,
though his country had not come in till so late, now it was offering
itself in a spirit unknown in national relations before.

When they had finished their supper, he brought her back to her work
and himself returned to his airdrome. The next day Ruth found a
chance to journey to Paris.

For information--accurate, dependable word of German intentions and
German preparations for the next attack--was the paramount essential
now. This first assault at last was stopped; but only after
tremendous catastrophe; and the Germans still possessed superiority
in physical strength as great as before. And they owned, even more
than before, confidence in themselves, while the allies’ at least
had been shaken. The Germans kept also, undoubtedly, the same powers
of secrecy which had enabled them to launch their tremendous
onslaught as a surprise to the allies, while they themselves
accurately had reckoned the allied strength and dispositions.

Ruth did not hope, by herself, to change all that. The wild dreams
of the girl who had taken up the bold enterprise offered her in
Chicago, had become tempered by experience, which let her know the
limits within which one person might work in this war; but the
probability that she would be unable to do greatly only increased
her will to do whatever she could.

Thus she returned to Paris to endeavor to encounter again the enemy
agents who would send her through Switzerland into Germany. As she
knew nothing of them, she must depend upon their seeking her; so she
went at once to her old room in the _pension_ upon the Rue des
Saints Pères. Arriving late in the afternoon, she found Milicent
home from work--a Milicent who put arms about her and cried over her
in relief that she was safe. Then Milicent brought her a cablegram.

“This came while you were gone, dear. I opened it and tried to
forward it to you.”

Ruth went white and her heart halted with fear. Had something
happened at home--to her mother or to her sisters?

“What is it?”

“Your brother’s badly wounded. He’s here in a hospital, Cynthia!”

“My brother!” Ruth cried. It had come to her as Cynthia Gail, of
course. She had thought, when nearing the _pension_, that probably
she would find an accumulation of mail to which, as Cynthia, she
must reply. But she had been Cynthia so long now that she had almost
ceased to fear an emergency. Her brother, of course, was Charles
Gail, who had quarreled with his father and of whom nothing had been
heard for four years.

Ruth took the message and learned that Charles had been with the
Canadians since the start of the war; he had enlisted under an
assumed name; but when wounded and brought to Paris, he had given
his real name and asked that his parents be informed. The
information had reached them; so his father had cabled Cynthia to
try to see Charles before he died.

“I told Lieutenant Byrne about it,” Milicent said to Ruth.

“Lieutenant Byrne?”

“Why, yes; wasn’t that right? He called here for you last week; and
several times since. He said he was engaged to you; why--isn’t he?”

“Yes, he was. That’s all right,” Ruth said.

“So he’s been about to see your brother.”

“How is he? Charles, I mean, of course.”

“He was still living yesterday.”

“Lieutenant Byrne is still here?”

“As far as I know, he is.”




CHAPTER XIII: BYRNE ARRIVES


Ruth turned, without asking more, and went into the room which had
been hers, and shut herself in alone. She dared not inquire anything
further, or permit anything more to be asked of her; she dared not
let Milicent see her until she had time to think.

Milicent and she long ago had given to one another those intimate
confidences about their personal affairs which girls, who share the
same rooms, usually exchange; but Ruth’s confidences, of course, had
detailed the family situation of Cynthia Gail. Accordingly, Ruth
knew that Milicent had believed that the boy, whose picture was the
third in the portfolio of Cynthia’s family, which Ruth always had
kept upon the dresser, was Ruth’s brother. Milicent would believe,
therefore, that it was this sudden discovery of her brother dying in
a Paris hospital which had shocked Ruth into need for being alone
just now.

Indeed, feeling for that boy, whose picture she had carried for so
long, and about whom she had written so many times to his parents,
and who was mentioned in some loving manner in almost every one of
those letters which Ruth had received from Decatur, had its part in
the tumult of sensations oversweeping her. But dominant in that
tumult was the knowledge that his discovery--and, even more
certainly, the arrival of George Byrne--meant extinction of Ruth as
Cynthia Gail; meant annihilation of her projects and her plans;
meant, perhaps, destruction of her even as Ruth Alden.

Ruth had not ceased to realize, during the tremendous events of
these last weeks, that at any moment someone might appear to betray
her; and she had kept some calculation of the probable consequence.
When she had first embraced this wild enterprise, which fate had
seemed to proffer, she had entered upon considerable risks; if
caught, she would have the difficult burden of proof, when she was
taking the enemy’s money and using a passport supplied by the enemy
and following--outwardly, at least--the enemy’s instructions, that
she was not actually acting for the enemy. But if she had been
betrayed during the first days, it would have been possible to show
how the true Cynthia Gail met her death and to show that she--Ruth
Alden--could have had no hand in that. But now more than two months
had passed since that day in Chicago when Ruth Alden took on her
present identity--more than two months since the body of Cynthia
Gail, still unrecognized, must have been cremated or laid away in
some nameless grave. Therefore, the former possibility no longer
existed.

Horror at her position, if she suddenly faced one of Cynthia Gail’s
family, sometimes startled Ruth up wide-awake in bed at night. She
had not been able to think what to do in such case as that; her mind
had simply balked before it; and every added week with its letters
subscribed by those forged “Thias” to Cynthia’s father, and those
intimate endearments to Cynthia’s mother, and those letters about
love to George Byrne--well, every day had made it more and more
impossible to prepare for the sometime inevitable confession.

For confession to Cynthia’s family must come if Ruth lived; but
only--she prayed--after the war and after she had done such service
that Cynthia’s people could at least partially understand why she
had tricked them. The best end of all, perhaps--and perhaps the most
probable--was that Ruth should be killed; she would die, then, as
Cynthia, and no one would challenge the dead. That was how Ruth
dismissed the matter when the terror within clamored for answer. But
she could not so dismiss it now.

Impulse seized her to flee and to hide. But, in the France of the
war, she could not easily do that; nor could she slip off from
Cynthia’s identity and name without complete disaster. Anywhere she
went--even if she desired to take lodgings in a different zone in
Paris, or indeed if she was to dwell elsewhere in the same zone--she
must present Cynthia’s passport and continue as Cynthia. And other,
and more conclusive reasons, controlled her.

Her sole justification for having become Cynthia Gail was her belief
that she could go into Germany by aid of the German agents who would
know her as Cynthia Gail. They could find her only if she went about
Cynthia Gail’s work and lived at the lodgings here.

Ruth was getting herself together during these moments of
realization. She opened the bedroom door and called in Milicent.

Charles Gail had been gassed. Milicent had not seen him, but
Lieutenant Byrne had visited him and repeated to Milicent that he
was not sure whether Charles knew him. Ruth scarcely could bear
thought of visiting Charles Gail and pretending that she was
Cynthia; but it was evident that he was so weak that he would
suspect nothing.

The chance of George Byrne betraying her was greater. He had been in
Paris, Milicent said, upon some special duty of indefinite duration.
Every time he had called he had left messages with Milicent and had
assumed that he might not be able to return to the Rue des Saints
Pères.

“He was here the day we got the news that Mirevaux was taken,”
Milicent said. “We tried in every way to get word of you. He was
almost crazy, dear. He loves you; don’t you ever doubt that!”

Ruth made no reply, though Milicent waited, watching her.

“I didn’t say anything to him about Gerry Hull, dear.”

“I’ve written him about meeting Gerry,” Ruth said, simply. “I’ll
start for the hospital now, Mil.”

“You’ll let me go with you, Cynthia?”

“Thanks; but it’s not--I think I’d rather not.”

Milicent gazed at her, a little surprised and hurt, but she made no
further offer.

Ruth went out on the Rue des Saints Pères alone; a start of panic
seized her as she gazed up and down the little street--panic that
from a neighboring doorway, or about one of the corners, George
Byrne might suddenly appear and speak to her.

The late spring afternoon was clear and warm; and that part of Paris
was quiet, when from Ruth’s right and ahead of her came the resound
and the concussion of a heavy explosion. Ruth gazed up,
instinctively, to find the German airplane from which a torpedo
might have dropped; but she saw only the faint, dragon-fly forms of
the French sentinel machines which constantly stood guard over
Paris. They circled and spun in and out monotonously, as usual, and
undisturbed at their watch; and, with a start, Ruth suddenly
remembered. From beyond the German lines in the forest of Saint
Gobain, Paris was being bombarded by some new monster of Krupp’s;
the explosion where a haze of débris dust was hanging over the roofs
a half mile or more away had been the burst of a shell from that
gun. Since the start of the German assault the Germans had been
sending these random shells to strike and kill at every half hour
for several hours upon almost every day. So Paris had learned to
recognize them; Paris had become accustomed to them; Parisians
shrugged when they struck. But Ruth did not.

The studied brutality of that German gun, more than sixty miles
away, dispatching its unaimed shells to do methodical,
indiscriminate murder in the city, was the sort of thing Ruth needed
at that moment to steady her to what lay before her. She was setting
herself to this, as to the rest, to help stop forever deeds like the
firing of that gun. She hastened on more resolutely; the gun fired
again, its monstrous, random shell falling in quite another quarter.
Presenting herself at the doors of the hospital, she ascertained
that Sergeant Charles Gail, who had originally been enrolled in a
Canadian battalion under another name, was still living.
Consultation with a nurse evoked the further information that he was
conscious at the present minute, but desperately weak; he had been
asking many times for his friends or word of his people; it was
therefore permissible--indeed, it was desirable--that his sister see
him.

Ruth followed the nurse between the long rows of beds where boys and
men lay until the nurse halted beside a boy whose wide-open eyes
gazed up, unmoving, at the ceiling; he was very thin and yellow, but
his brows yet held some of the boldness, in the set of his chin was
still some of the high spirit of defiance of the picture in the
portfolio--the boy who had quarreled with his father four years ago
and who had run away to the war.

“Here is your sister,” the nurse told him gently in French.

“My sister?” he repeated the French words while his eyes sought and
found Ruth. A tinge of color came to his cheek; with an effort a
hand lifted from the coverlet.

“Hello, Cynth,” he said. “They said--you were--here.”

Ruth bent and kissed his forehead. “All right, Cynth,” he murmured
when she withdrew a little. “You can do that again.”

Ruth did it again and sat down beside him. His hand was in hers; and
whenever she relaxed her tight grasp of it he stirred impatiently.
He did not know she was not his sister. His eyes rested upon hers,
but vacantly; he was too exhausted to observe critically; his sister
had come, they said; and if she was not exactly as he remembered
her, why he had not seen her for four years; a great deal had
happened to her, and even more had happened to him. Her lips were
soft and warm as his sister’s always had been; her hands were very
gentle, and it was awfully good to have her there.

Ruth was full of joy that she had dared to come; for she was, to
this boy, his sister.

“Tell me--about--home,” he begged her.

“I’ve brought all my letters,” she said; and opening them with one
hand--for he would not have her lose grasp of him--she read the home
news until the nurse returned and, nodding, let Ruth know she must
go.

He could not follow in his mind the simple events related in the
letters; but he liked to hear the sentences about home objects, and
the names of the people he had loved, and who loved him.

“You’ll--come back--tomorrow, Cynth?” he pleaded.

Ruth promised and kissed him again and departed.

It was quite dark now on the streets with only the sound of the
evening bustle. The long-range German gun had ceased firing; but the
dim lights beside doorways proved that on this clear, still night
the people of Paris realized the danger of air raids. Ruth was
hurrying along, thinking of the boy she had left and of his comrades
in the long rows of beds; from them her thoughts flew back to the
battle, to “1583” and his English on the hill, to Grand’mère
Bergues’ farm, and to Gerry Hull; she thought of the German soldiers
she had seen with him and of her errand to their land. Almost before
she realized it, she was turning into the little street of the Holy
Fathers when a man, approaching out of the shadows, suddenly halted
before her and cried out:

“Cynthia!”

The glow of light was behind him, so she could not make out his
face; but she knew that only one stranger, recognizing her as
Cynthia, could have cried out to her like that; so she spoke his
name instantly, instinctively, before she thought.

Her voice either was like Cynthia’s or, in his rush of feeling,
George Byrne did not notice a difference. He had come before her and
was seizing her hands; his fingers, after their first grasp, moved
up her arms. “Cynthia; my own Cynthia,” he murmured her name. At
first he had held her in the glow of the light the better to see
her; but now he carried her back with him into the shadow; and his
arms were around her; he was crushing her against him, kissing her
lips, her cheeks, her lips again, her hands from which he stripped
the gloves.

She strained to compress her repulse of him. He was not rough nor
sensuous; he simply was possessing himself of her in full passion of
love. If she were Cynthia, who loved this man, she would have clung
in his embrace in the abandonment of joy. Ruth tried to think of
that and control herself not to repel him; but she could not.
Reflexes, beyond her obedience, opposed him.

Ever since Milicent had informed her that he was in Paris, Ruth had
been forming plans for every contingency of their meeting; but this
encounter had introduced elements different from any expectations.
If this visit to the street of the Holy Fathers was to be his last
one before leaving Paris, then perhaps she had better keep him out
upon the street in the dark and play at being Cynthia until she
could dismiss him. She must feel--or at least she must betray--no
recoil of outrage at his taking her into his arms. He had had that
right with Cynthia Gail. Though he and Cynthia had quarreled--and
Ruth had never mended that quarrel--yet Cynthia and he had loved.
Too much had passed between them to put them finally apart. And now,
as Ruth felt his arms enfolding her, his lips on hers, and his
breath whispering to her his passionate love, she knew that Cynthia
could not have forbidden this.

He took Ruth’s struggle as meant to tempt his strength and he
laughed joyously as, very gently, he overpowered her. She tried to
cease to struggle; she tried to laugh as Cynthia would have laughed;
but she could not. “Don’t!” she found herself resisting. “Don’t!”

“Oh! I hurt you, dearest?”

“Yes,” she said; though he had not. And remorsefully and with
anxious endearments, he let her go.

“You’ve heard about Charles?” he asked.

“I’ve just come from him.”

“He’s--the same?”

“Yes.”

She stood gasping against the wall of a building, entirely in the
shadow herself, with the little light which reached them showing her
his face. Ruth liked that face; and she liked the girl whom she
played at being--that Cynthia whose identity she was carrying on,
but about whom she yet knew so little--for having loved this man.
George Byrne had been clean-living; he was strong and eager, but
gentle, too. He had high thoughts and resolute ideals. These he had
told her in those letters which had come; but Ruth had not embodied
them in him till now. She was recovering from the offense of having
anyone’s arms but Gerry’s about her. She was not conscious of
thinking of Gerry that way; only, his arms had been about her, he
had held her; and, because of that, what she had just undergone had
been more difficult to bear.

“I love you; you love me, Cynthia?” Byrne was begging of her now.

“Of course I do,” she said.

“There’s not someone else, then? Tell me, Cynthia!”

“No--no one else,” she breathed. What could she say? She was not
speaking for herself; but for Cynthia; and now she was absolutely
sure that, for Cynthia, there could have been no one else. But she
could not deceive him.

“My God!” he gasped the realization to himself, drawing back a
little farther from her. “Then that’s--that’s been the matter all
the time.”

“All what time?” she asked.

“Since you met Gerry Hull in Chicago.”

He meant, of course, since the girl who had loved him had died; but
he did not know that. He had felt a change in the letters which had
come to him which he could not explain as merely the result of their
quarrel. Another man seemed to him the only possible explanation.

Someone opened a door behind them; and Ruth withdrew from the shaft
of light. “We can’t stay here, George,” she said.

She thought that now he was noticing a difference in her voice; but
if he did, evidently he put it down as only part of her alteration
toward him.

“Where can we go?” he asked her.

“Not back to the _pension_,” Ruth said.

“No; no! Can’t you stay out with me here? We can walk.”

“Yes.”

He faced down the street of the Holy Fathers away from the
_pension_; she came beside him. He took her hand and for a moment
held it as, undoubtedly, he and Cynthia had done when walking in
darkened streets together; but after a few steps he released her.

“Your hand’s thinner, Cynthia.”

“I suppose so.”

“You’re a little thinner all over. I can’t see you well; but you
felt that way,” he said a little sadly, referring to his embrace
which she had broken. “You’ve been overdoing, of course.”

She made no reply; and for several seconds he offered nothing more
but went on, gazing down at her. “You’ve been fine, Cynthia, in
getting those people out.” He spoke of what he had heard of her work
in the retreat. “I knew ten days ago you were in it; but I couldn’t
go to you! I tried to; I tried to get into the fight. We all
tried--our men; but they didn’t want us. Except Gerry Hull, of
course, and a few like him.”

He said this so completely without bitterness--with envy, only--that
Ruth felt more warmly for him. “It’s Gerry Hull, isn’t it, Cynthia?”
he demanded directly.

“Yes,” she admitted now. Denial had become wholly impossible;
moreover, by telling the truth--or that much of the truth which had
to do with Gerry Hull--she might send George Byrne away. It was a
cruel wrong to him, and to the girl who was dead; but the wrong
already was done. Ruth merely was beginning herself to reap some of
the fruits of her deception.

“You love him?” Byrne inquired of her inevasively.

“Yes.”

“He loves you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s he said to you?”

“Nothing--about loving me.”

“But he loves you, all right; he must, if he knows you!” Byrne
returned in pitiful loyalty to his Cynthia. “How much has gone on
between you?” he demanded.

Ruth related to him much about her meetings with Gerry, while they
walked side by side about the Paris streets. A dozen times she was
on the point of breaking down and telling him all the truth; when
his hand reached toward hers, instinctively, and suddenly pulled
away; when they passed a light and, venturing to gaze up, she saw
his face as he looked down at her; when he asked her questions or
offered short, hoarse interjections, she almost cried out to him
that she was a fraud; the girl he had loved, and who she was saying
had turned from him, was dead and had been dead all that time during
which he had felt the difference; she had never met Gerry Hull at
all.

“What are you stopping for?” he asked her at one of these times.
“Thinking about the Sangamon River?”

That was the Illinois river which flowed close by Cynthia Gail’s
home. And Ruth knew from his voice that by the river Cynthia and he
first had known love.

“Yes,” Ruth said; but now her courage completely failed her.

“What did you say to me, then; oh, what did we both say, Cynthia?”

This was no test or challenge of Ruth; it was simply a cry from his
heart.

    How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,
    I love thee to the depth and height....

He was starting to quote something which they used to repeat
together.

“Go on, Cynthia!” he charged.

“I can’t,” Ruth cried.

“You can’t--after you found it and taught it to me? ‘_I love thee
with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life_,’” he quoted
bitterly to her. “Let me look at you better, Cynthia!”

They were passing a light and he drew her closer to it.

“What has happened to you?” he whispered to her aghast when he had
searched her through and through with his eyes. Then, “_Who are
you?_”

He had made, he realized, some frightful mistake; how he could have
come to make it, he did not know. “You’re not Cynthia Gail!” he
cried. For an instant, that discovery was enough for him. The agony
which he had been suffering this last half hour was not real; the
girl whom he had found on the street never had been his; they had
both been going about only in some grotesque error.

“No; I’m not Cynthia Gail,” Ruth told him.

“Then where is she?” he demanded. “Where is my Cynthia?” His hands
were upon Ruth and he shook her a little in the passion of his
demand. He could not even begin to suspect the truth; but--from
sight of her now--fear flicked him. If this girl was not Cynthia----

“How are you so like her?” he put his challenge aloud. “Why did you
pretend to be her? Why? You tell me why!”

“I’ll tell you,” Ruth said. “But not here.”

“Where?”

“We must find some place where we can talk undisturbed; where we can
have a long talk.”

“Take me to her, first. That’s all I care about. I don’t care about
you--or why you did that. I don’t care, I say. Take me to Cynthia;
or I’ll go there.”

He started away toward the Rue des Saints Pères and the _pension_;
so Ruth swiftly caught his sleeve.

“You can’t go to her!” Ruth gasped to him. “She’s not there. Believe
me, you can’t find her!”

“Why not?”

“She’s--we must find some place, Mr. Byrne!”

“She’s--what? Killed? Killed, you were going to say?”

“Yes; she’s been killed.”

“In Picardy, you mean? Where? How? Why, she was at her rooms two
hours ago. Miss Wetherell told me; or was she lying to me?”

“I was at the rooms two hours ago,” Ruth said. “Miss Wetherell knows
me as Cynthia Gail. I’ve been Cynthia Gail since January.”

“What do you mean? How?”

“Cynthia Gail died in January, Mr. Byrne.”

“What? How? Where?”

“She was killed--in Chicago.”

“That’s a lie! Why, I’ve been hearing from her myself.”

“You’ve been hearing from me. I’m Cynthia Gail, I tell you. I’ve
been Cynthia Gail since January.”

He caught another glimpse of her face; and his impetuousness to
start to the Rue des Saints Pères collapsed, pitifully. “Where shall
we go?” he asked.

Ruth gazed about, uncertainly; she had not attended to their
direction; and now she found herself in a strange, narrow street of
tiny shops and apartments, interrupted a half square ahead by a
chasm of ruins and strewn débris, where one of those random shells
from the German long-range gun, or a bomb dropped from a
night-raiding Gotha recently had struck. The destruction had been
done sufficiently long ago, however, for the curiosity of the
neighborhood to have been already satisfied and for all treasures to
have been removed. The ruin was fenced off, therefore, and was
unguarded. Ruth gazed into the shell of the building and Byrne,
glancing in also, saw that in the rear were apartments half wrecked
and deserted, but which offered sanctuary from the street.




CHAPTER XIV: FULL CONFESSION


“No one will be likely to come in here,” Ruth said, and stepped into
the house.

Byrne followed her without comment, quite indifferent to their
surroundings. When Ruth spoke to him again about the house, he
replied vacantly; his mind was not here, but with Cynthia Gail,
where he had last seen her in Chicago that Sunday night in January
when they had parted. What had thereafter happened to her was the
first matter to him.

Ruth, exploring the ruin, came upon a room which seemed to have been
put in some sort of order, so far as she could see from the dim
light which came through the doorway.

“Give me a match,” she asked Byrne; he took a matchbox from his
pocket and, striking a light, he held it while they peered about.
There was a fixture protruding from the wall, but no light resulted
when Ruth turned the switch. Byrne’s match went out; he struck
several others before their search discovered a bit of a candle in
an old sconce in a corner. Byrne lit it, and Ruth closed the door
which led into what had been a hallway. She returned to Byrne, who
had remained in the corner where the candle diffused its light.
There was a built-in bench there beside an old fireplace, a couple
of old chairs and a table.

“Let’s sit down,” Ruth said.

“You sit down,” Byrne bid. “I’ll--” he did not finish his sentence;
but he remained standing, hands behind him, staring down at her as
she seated herself upon the bench.

“Now,” he said to her.

His lips pressed tight and Ruth could see that he jerked with short
spasms of emotion which shuddered his shoulders suddenly together
and shook his whole body.

Ruth had desired the light instinctively, with no conscious reason;
the same instinct which made her need to see him before she could go
on, probably affected him; but with him had been the idea that the
light would banish the illusion which overswept him again and again
that this girl still was his Cynthia. But the faint, flickering
illumination from the candle had failed to do that; it seemed, on
the contrary, at times to restore and strengthen the illusion. A
better light might have served him more faithfully; and if he
brought her close to the candle and scrutinized her again as he had
under the light of the street, he would see surely that she was
someone else. But here, Ruth realized, she was falling into the
postures of the girl who was dead.

“Cynthia!” Byrne whispered again to her.

“What I know about Cynthia Gail,” Ruth said to him gently then, “is
this.” And she told, almost without interruption from him, how
Cynthia had met her death. Ruth did not explain how she had learned
her facts; for a while the facts themselves were overwhelming
enough. He made sure that he could learn nothing more from her
before he challenged her as to how she knew.

“You read this in a newspaper, you said?”

“Yes; in all the Chicago newspapers,” Ruth replied. “I read the
accounts in all to find out everything which was known about her.”

“Wait now! You said no one knew her; she was not identified.”

“No; she was not.”

“Then you saw her? You identified her?”

“No; I never saw her.”

“Then how do you know it was Cynthia? See here; what are you holding
from me? How do you know she’s dead at all?”

“The Germans told me. The Germans said that she was the girl who was
killed in that wreck.”

“The Germans? What Germans? What do you mean?”

“A German--I don’t know who--but some German identified her from her
passport and took the passport.”

“Why? How do you know that? How did you get into her affairs,
anyway?”

“Because I was like her,” Ruth said. “I happened to be so very like
her that----”

“That what?” He was standing over her now, shaking, controlling
himself by intervals of effort; and Ruth faltered, huddling back a
little farther from him and gazing up at him aghast. She had
determined, a few minutes earlier, that there had become no
alternative for her but to confess to him the entire truth; but the
truth which she had to tell had become an incredible thing, as the
truth--the exact truth of the circumstances which fix fates--has a
way of becoming.

Desperately her mind groped for a way to arrange the events of that
truth in a way to make him believe; but each moment of delay only
made her task more impossible. He had roused from the suspicion,
which had begun to inflame him when they were yet on the street, to
a certainty that the girl whom he loved had been foully dealt by.

“That what?” he demanded again.

So Ruth told him about herself, and the first meeting with Gerry
Hull, and the pencil boxes, and the beggar on State Street. She did
not proceed without interruptions now; he challenged and catechized
her. If he had refused her whole story, it would not have been so
bad; but he was believing part of it--the part which fitted his
passions. He believed that the Germans had found the body of Cynthia
Gail, and he believed more than that. He believed that they had
killed her, and he cried out to Ruth to tell him when, and how. He
believed that the Germans, having killed Cynthia, had tried to make
use of her identity and her passport; and that they had succeeded!
His hands were upon Ruth once more, holding her sternly and firmly.

“I put you under arrest,” he said to her hoarsely, “as accessory in
the murder of Cynthia Gail and as a German spy.”

And yet, as he held her there before him in the dim light of the
tallow wick in the sconce upon the wall, she seemed to him, for
flashes of time, to be the girl he accused her of having killed.

“Cynthia; where are you?” he pleaded with her once as though, within
Ruth, was the soul of his love whom he could call to come out and
take possession of this living form.

Then he had her under arrest again. “Come with me!” he commanded,
and he thrust her toward the door. But now Ruth fought against him.

“No; we must stay here!”

“Why?”

“Till you will believe in me!”

“Then we’ll never leave here. Will you come, or must I take you?”

“Leave me alone just a minute.”

“So you can get away?”

“No; just you stay here. I’ll go back there,” Ruth tossed toward the
corner where she had sat. “There’s no way out. Only--let go of me!”

He did so, watching her suspiciously. She dropped into her seat in
the corner under the candle. “I’ve told you why I did this,” she
said.

“And you didn’t fool me.”

“I’ve no proof of anything I’ve told you,” Ruth went on, “only
because, if you’ll think about it, you’ll see I couldn’t carry
proof.”

“I should say not.”

“But I’ve done something since I’ve been here which proves what I
am.”

“What? Helping refugees out of Picardy? What does that prove--except
that you’ve nerve?”

“Nothing,” Ruth admitted. “If I was a German agent, I might have
done that. I wasn’t thinking of that.”

“What of, then?”

She was thinking about her exposure of De Trevenac; but, though now
it was known that Louis de Trevenac had been proved a spy, had been
tried and punished, no explanation had been given as to how he had
been caught. Those who tried him had not known, perhaps; only Gerry
knew.

“Gerry Hull will tell you,” Ruth replied. “I don’t ask you to take
my word about myself anymore; I ask you only, before you accuse me,
to send for him.”

“Gerry Hull!” Byrne iterated, approaching her closely again and
gazing down hostilely. For an instant he had not been able to
disassociate Gerry Hull from himself as a rival for Cynthia Gail.
“So he knows all about you, does he?”

“No; he thinks I am Cynthia Gail; but----”

“What?”

“He knows--he must know that, whoever I am, I’m loyal! So send for
him, or go and speak to him before you do anything more; that’s all
I ask. Oh, I know this has been horrible for you, Mr. Byrne.” For
the first time Ruth was losing control of herself. “But do you
suppose it’s been easy for me? And do you suppose I’ve done it for
myself or for any adventure to see the war or just to come here?
I’ve done it to go into Germany! Oh, you won’t stop me now! For if
you leave me alone--don’t you see--I may get into Germany tomorrow
or this week or anyway before the next big attack can come! What do
I count, what do you count, what can the memory of Cynthia Gail
count in comparison with what I may do if I can go on into Germany?
What----”

“Don’t cry!” Byrne forbade her hoarsely, seizing her shoulder and
shaking her almost roughly. “My God, Cynthia,” he begged, “don’t
cry.”

He had called her by that name again; and Ruth knew that, not her
appeal, but her semblance in her emotion to Cynthia, had overcome
him for the moment.

“I’m not going to cry,” Ruth said. “But----”

He stopped her brusquely. He seemed afraid, indeed, to let her go
on. “Whether I’ve got to bring you to the army authorities and give
you over at once under arrest,” he said coldly, “is up to you. If
you agree to go with me quietly--and keep your agreement--I’ll take
you along myself.”

“Where?” Ruth asked.

“I know some people, whom I can trust and who can take you in charge
till I can talk to Hull. He’s the only reference you care to give?”

“Yes,” she said.

“If he stands for you, that won’t mean anything to me, I might as
well tell you,” Byrne returned. “You’ve probably got him fooled; you
could do it, all right, I guess.”

“Then what’s the use in your sending for him?”

“Oh; you think now there’s none? It was your idea, not mine.”

“I’ll go with you quietly to your friends,” Ruth decided, ending
this argument. “I’ll understand that you’re going to communicate
with Gerry Hull about me.”

She arose and Byrne seized her arm firmly. He blew out the candle
and, still clasping her, he groped his way to the door. Some one
stepped in the rubbish on the other side. They had been conscious,
during their stay in the room, that many people had passed outside;
once or twice, perhaps, a passer-by might have paused to gaze at the
ruin; but Ruth had heard no one enter the house. Byrne had heard no
one; for his grasp on Ruth’s arm tightened with a start of surprise
as he realized that the someone who now suddenly moved on the other
side of the door must have come there moments before.

Byrne stepped back, drawing Ruth with him, and thrusting her a
little behind him. The person on the other side of the door was a
watchman, perhaps, or the owner of this house or a neighbor
investigating to what use these ruined rooms were now being put.
Byrne, thinking thus, spoke loudly in labored French, “I am an
American officer, with a companion, who has looked in here.”

“Very well,” came in French and in a man’s voice from the other side
of the door. Byrne advanced to the door and opened it, therefore,
and was going through when a bludgeon beat down upon him. Byrne
reeled back, raising his left arm to shield off another blow; he
tried to strike back with his left arm and grapple his assailant;
but with his right, he still held to Ruth as though she would seize
this chance to escape; and yet, at the same time, Ruth felt that he
was protecting her with his body before hers.

“Let me go!” she jerked to be free. “I’ll--help you!”

He did not mean to let her go when she struggled free; he was still
trying to hold to her and also fight the man who was beating at him.
But her getting free, let him close with his assailant and grapple
with him. They spun about and went down, rolling over and over in
the débris. Ruth grabbed up a bit of iron pipe from among the
wreckage on the floor; and she bent over trying to strike at the man
with the bludgeon.

“Help!” she called out. “_Secours!_”

She knew now that the man who had waited outside was no mere
defender of the house; the treachery and the violence of his attack
could not be explained by concern for safety of that ruin. Ruth
could not think who the man might be or what was his object except
that he was fighting to kill, as he struck and fought with Byrne on
the floor. And Byrne, knowing it, was fighting to kill him, too.

“_Secours!_” Ruth screamed for help again and with her bit of iron,
she struck--whom, she did not know. But they rolled away and pounded
each other only a few moments more before one overcame the other.
One leaped up while the other lay on the floor; the one who had
leaped up, crouched down and bludgeoned the other again; so that
Ruth knew that Byrne was the one who lay still. She screamed out
again for help while she flung herself at the man who was bending
over. But he turned about and caught her arms and held her firmly.
He bent his head to hers and whispered to her while he held her.

“_Weg!_” The whisper warned her. It was German, “Away!” And the rest
that he said was in German. “I have him for you struck dead!
Careful, now! Away to Switzerland!”

He dropped Ruth and fled; she went after him, breathless, trying to
cry out; but her cries were weak and unheard. He ran through the
rear of the house into a narrow alley down which he disappeared; she
went to the end of the alley, crying out. But the man was gone. She
stopped running at last and ceased to call out. She stood, swaying
so that she caught to a railing before a house to steady herself.
The words of the whisper ran on her lips. “I have him for you struck
dead!”

They gave her explanation of the attack which, like the words of De
Trevenac to her, permitted only one possible meaning. The man who
had waited in the ruined house must have been one of the German
agents in Paris whom Ruth had returned to meet. Evidently, while
Byrne had been inquiring for her, the Germans too had been vigilant;
they had awaited her return either to get her report of what she had
seen in Picardy or to assign her to another task or--she could not
know why they awaited her; but certainly they had. One of them had
learned that afternoon that she had returned; he was seeking her,
perhaps, when Byrne found her. Perhaps he had known the peril to her
from Byrne; perhaps he merely had learned, from whatever he had
overheard of their talk in that ruined room, that Byrne accused her
of being a German spy; and so he had taken his chance to strike, for
her, Byrne dead.

The horror of this realization sickened her; the German murderer
“for her” had made good his escape; and it would be useless to
report him now. She would be able to offer no description of him;
and to report that a large man, who was a German spy, had been about
that part of Paris this evening would be idle. But she must return
at once to Byrne who might not be dead. So she steadied herself and
hastened down the street seeking the ruined house.

It was a part of Paris quite unfamiliar to her; and, as she had not
observed where she and Byrne had wandered, she passed a square or
two without better placing herself; and then, inquiring of a
passer-by, where was a ruined house, she obtained directions which
seemed to be correct; but arriving at the ruin, she found it was not
the one which Byrne and she had entered. Consequently it was many
minutes before she found the ruined house which gave her no doubt of
its identity. For people were gathered about it; and Ruth,
approaching these, learned that a monstrous attack had been made
upon an American infantry officer who, when first found, was
believed to have been killed; but the surgeon who had arrived and
had removed him, said this was not so. Robbery, some said, had been
the motive of the crime; for the officer had much money in his
pocket; but the murderer had not time to remove it. Others, who
claimed to have heard a girl’s voice, believed there might have been
more personal reasons; why had a man and a girl been in those rooms
that night?

Ruth breathed her thankfulness that Byrne was not dead; and she
withdrew. Since Byrne had been taken away, she could do nothing for
him; and she would simply destroy herself by giving herself up to
the authorities. If Byrne lived and regained consciousness,
undoubtedly he would inform against her.

But though she would not give herself up, certainly she would not
try to escape if Byrne accused her; she would return to her room and
go about her work while she awaited consequences.

None followed her that night. She admitted to Milicent, when
questioned, that she had met Lieutenant Byrne upon the street and
they had walked together; Ruth said also that she had seen her
brother. Milicent evidently ascribed her agitation to a quarrel with
Byrne.

Ruth lay awake most of that night. The morning paper which Milicent
and she read contained no mention, amid the tremendous news from the
front, of the attack upon an American officer in a ruined house; and
no consequences threatened Ruth that morning. She planned for a
while to try to trace Byrne and learn whether he had regained
consciousness; then she abandoned that purpose. She was satisfied,
from one of those instincts which baffle question, that Byrne lived;
and it would be only a question of time before he must accuse her.

Yet she might have time enough to leave Paris and France--to get
away into Switzerland and into Germany. For the fact that a German
had for her attempted to strike her accuser dead was final proof
that the Germans had not connected her with the betrayal of De
Trevenac; they believed that she had been in Picardy all this time
on account of orders given her by De Trevenac.

It was possible, of course, that the German who had struck for her
and whom she had pursued, would now himself suspect her. Yet her
flight after him might have seemed to him only her ruse to escape.
What he had last said to her, she must receive as her orders from
the Germans in Paris. “Away to Switzerland!”

That concurred with the sentence of instruction given upon that page
which she had received with her passport that cold January morning
in Chicago.... “You will report in person, via Switzerland; apply
for passport to Lucerne.”

At this moment when, for the cause of her country and its allies,
she had determined that she must make the attempt to go on to
Germany, the Germans were ready to have her. And that was easy to
understand; she had spent weeks going about freely behind the newly
formed English and French lines which bagged back about the immense
salient which the Germans had thrust toward Amiens; she was
supposed, as a German, to have ready report about the strength of
those lines as seen from the rear, of the strength of the support,
the morale of soldiers and civilians and the thousand other details
which the enemy desired to know.

So Ruth went early that morning to the United States Consul General
with her passport which long ago had been substituted for that
ruined passport of Cynthia Gail’s; and she offered it for _visé_,
asking permission to leave Paris and France for a visit to the
neutral country of Switzerland, and, more particularly, to Lucerne.
She stated that the object of her journey was rest and recuperation;
she knew that, not infrequently in the recent months, American girls
who had been working near the war zones had been permitted vacations
in Switzerland; but she found that times were different now. She
encountered no expressed suspicion and no discourtesy; she simply
was informed that in the present crisis it was impossible to act
immediately upon such requests. Her application would be filed and
passed upon in due time; and a clerk questioned Ruth concerning the
war service which she had rendered which was supposed to have so
exhausted her that she desired rest in Switzerland.

Ruth, hot with shame, perforce related what she had been through in
the retreat. She was quite aware when she went away and returned to
her work that her application for permission to go to Switzerland
would be the most damning evidence against her, when Byrne should
bring his accusation; and now, having made application, she could do
nothing but wait where she was. However, she heard nothing from
Byrne or from the authorities upon that day nor upon the succeeding
days of the week during which she worked, as she had when she first
came to Paris, in the offices of the relief society; upon almost
every afternoon she visited Charles Gail who was slowly sinking.

After three days and then after a wait of three more, she revisited
the consulate and inquired about her _permission_ for Switzerland;
but she got no satisfaction either time. But when at last the week
wore out and she met no interference with her ordinary comings and
goings, she was beginning to doubt her beliefs that George Byrne
lived; he must have died, she thought, and without having been able
to communicate his knowledge of her to anyone. Then one night she
was returning to the Rue des Saints Pères a little later than usual;
the mild, April afternoon had dimmed to twilight and, as she passed
the point where George Byrne had encountered her, fears possessed
her again; they lessened only to increase once more, as they now had
formed a habit of doing, when she approached the _pension_.

“Letters for me, Fanchette?” she said to the daughter of her
landlady who was at the door when Ruth came in.

“No letters, Mademoiselle; but Monsieur le Lieutenant!”

Ruth stopped stark. Many Messieurs les Lieutenants and men of other
ranks called at the _pension_ for Milicent or for Ruth, just for an
evening’s entertainment; but such did not appear at this hour.

“He is in the salon, Mademoiselle.”

Ruth went in. If it was George Byrne, at least then he was alive and
now strong again. The lamp in the little salon had been lit; and a
tall, uniformed figure arose from beside it.

“Hello, Cynthia,” a familiar voice greeted. Gerry Hull’s voice!

Ruth retreated a little and held to the door to support her in her
relaxation of relief. A hundred times during this terrible week,
Ruth had wanted to send for him.

“I’m so glad to see you, Gerry.”

“That’s good.” His tall, lithe self was beside her; his strong,
steady fingers grasped her arm and gently supported her when she let
go the door. He closed the door and led her to a chair where the
light of the lamp would fall full upon her. “Sit down there,” he
commanded kindly; and, when she obeyed, he seated himself opposite
pulling his chair closer the better to observe her but at the same
time bringing himself under the light.

He had changed a great deal since last she saw him, Ruth thought.
No; she corrected herself, not so much since she had parted from him
after the retreat from Picardy; but he had altered greatly since
last he sat opposite her in this little salon at that time they
talked together about De Trevenac. The boy he had been when she
first saw him on the streets of Chicago; the boy he had been when he
had spoken at Mrs. Corliss’, had been maturing with marvelous
swiftness in these last weeks into a man. His eyes showed it--his
fine, impulsive, determined eyes, no less resolute and not less
impatient, really, but somehow a little more tolerant and
understanding than they had been. His lips showed it--thinner a
trifle and a trifle more drawn and straight though they seemed to
smile quite as easily. His whole bearing betrayed, not so much an
abandonment of creeds he had lived by, as a doubt of their total
sufficiency and the unsettledness which comes to one beginning to
grasp something new.

“You’ve changed a good deal,” Ruth offered audibly.

“I was thinking that about you,” Gerry said.

“I guess--I guess we’ve changed some--together.”

“I guess so.”

She sat without response. Someone neared the door and Ruth roused
and, forgetting Gerry for an instant, she listened in covert alarm
in a manner which had become so habitual to her these last days that
she was not aware of it until he noticed it. The step passed the
door; and Ruth settled back.

“Well, Cynthia,” Gerry asked her directly then, “what have you been
up to?”

“What do you mean?”

“I was going to come to Paris to see you next week,” Gerry said.
“But something particular came up yesterday to make me manage this
today. I shouldn’t tell you, I suppose; in fact I know I shouldn’t.
The intelligence people have been poking about inquiring about you.”

Ruth felt herself growing pale but she asked steadily enough,

“Where?”

“Where I was for one place.”

“They asked you about me?”

He nodded. “They asked Agnes Ertyle, too.”

“Why?”

“That’s what I came here to find out. What’re you up to now?”

He knew nothing, Ruth was sure, about George Byrne. Whatever
knowledge was in the hands of those who questioned him, he knew
nothing more than the fact of the inquiry.

“It’s because I’ve applied for permission to go to Switzerland, I
suppose,” Ruth said.

“To go where?” he questioned.

She repeated it.

He bent closer quickly.

“Why in the world are you going there?”

“To rest up.”

“You? That’s what you told the Embassy people, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Well, did they believe it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope you didn’t expect me to. Look at me, Cynthia Gail. Why are
you traveling to Switzerland; you have to tell me the truth of what
you intend to do!”




CHAPTER XV: GERRY’S PROBLEM


Ruth had told that truth, perforce, to George Byrne with the result
that he had condemned her; and, when meeting this condemnation, she
had said that Gerry must know that she was loyal. But did she know
that now?

Questions crowded upon her which, she knew, must come to him. She
had betrayed De Trevenac; but it was a known principle of the German
spy organization that, at certain times and under certain
circumstances, one agent would betray another. The Germans punished
some of their spies in this way; in other cases, when a man was to
be discarded who had ceased to be useful, another spy had been
appointed to betray him for the advantage that the betrayal would
bring to the informer.

Immediately after that betrayal, Ruth had gone to the precise
districts concerning which the Germans had desired information
preceding and during their attack and where results proved that
spies must have been numerous and unsuspected. Gerry had commented
upon this to Ruth during their retreat from Mirevaux; and when she
replied, he had realized again that she was not in France doing
“just relief work.” He had asked what else she was doing; she had
evaded answer. Would he believe her answer now or only that part of
it which George Byrne had believed?

She arose and went to the door and saw that it was firmly closed.

“Do you remember, Gerry,” she asked when she returned “that first
time we talked together in Mrs. Corliss’ conservatory, that I said I
woke up that morning trying to imagine myself knowing you--without
the slightest hope that I ever could?”

“I remember you said something like that, Cynthia.”

“Did you ever wonder how that might be? I mean that I should have
been invited to Mrs. Corliss’ and that same morning not imagine that
I could meet you?”

“I suppose I thought Mrs. Corliss hadn’t called you till late,”
Gerry said.

“She never called me, myself, at all. A girl--a strange girl, whom I
had never seen--a girl named Cynthia Gail had been asked. But she
had died before that day; so I came in her place.”

Gerry drew a little nearer intently. “Because your names were the
same; you were related to her?”

“No; I wasn’t related to her at all; and our names were entirely
different.”

“But you----”

“Took her name, yes, I did.”

“And her passport?” He was thinking now, Ruth knew, of her ruined
passport and how he had advised her about having a new picture put
on it and how it had been, not by her own credentials but by his
requesting Agnes Ertyle to vouch for her, that she had been accepted
in France.

“Yes; I took her passport and her identity--everything she had and
was, Gerry. I became on noon of that day Cynthia Gail. That
forenoon, I was Ruth Alden working for a real estate firm named
Hilton Brothers in Chicago for twenty-five dollars a week. I wanted
to tell you that--oh I wanted so much to tell you all about myself
that afternoon when you asked how I happened to be at Mrs. Corliss’
and could think and say such different things from the other people
there.”

“Why didn’t you?”

She confused him, at first, as she had George Byrne; and she made
Gerry suspicious, too, but with an impersonal challenge and distrust
quite distinct from what Byrne’s had been. The real Cynthia Gail, of
course, had meant nothing to Gerry; he had known her only as Ruth
had come to him. What he was concerned for was the cause for which
and in which he had lived for four years--the cause which was
protected and secured by passports and credentials and authentic
identities and which was threatened by those who forged passports
and appeared in the allied lines under names other than their own.

“I dared trust no one then--you almost last of all.”

“With what?”

“The great plan which I dreamed I might carry out alone--a plan of
going into Germany, Gerry, as a spy for America!”

“Ah! So that’s the idea in Switzerland!”

“Yes. The chance came to me that morning within a few minutes after
I spoke to you in the motor car on the street. You remember that?”

“Of course.”

“I was almost crazy to get into the war; and I couldn’t find any
way; then....”

She told him, much as she had told Byrne, about the German who had
played the beggar and who had stopped her; of the disclosures in her
room; of her going to the hotel and finding Hubert waiting; and
then, after she had gone to Mrs. Corliss’ and met Gerry, how the
German woman had ordered her to take the _Ribot_.

“The rest about me, I guess you know now, Gerry.”

He made no answer as he had made no challenge except a question or
two to bring out some point more clearly. For a while, as she made
her confession, he had remained seated opposite her and gazing at
her with increasing confusion and distress; then, unable to remain
quiet, he had leaped to his feet.

“Go on,” he had bid when she halted. “I’m listening.” And she knew
that he was not only listening but feeling too as he paced to and
fro before her on the other side of the lamp staring down at the
floor for long seconds, glancing at her, then staring away again.

“Hush!” he had warned her once when someone passed the door; she had
waited and he had stood listening for the step to die away.

“All right now,” he had told her.

That was all that he had said; but his tone had told of fear of
anyone else hearing what she was confessing to him; and then there
beat back upon him realization that the chief threat to her must be
from himself.

“I knew you were up to something, Ruth,” he murmured under his
breath. “Ruth,” he repeated her name, “Ruth Alden! That fits you
better somehow; and what you’ve been doing fits you better, too.
But--” he realized suddenly that this was acknowledging belief in
her--belief beyond his right to have faith in this girl who once on
the boat had tried to save his life and who, upon the battle field,
had saved him and at frightful risk to herself. But he was not
thinking chiefly of that; he was thinking of their intimacies from
the first and particularly of that day when, after she had saved him
from the wreck of his machine, they had driven away from the battle
together.

“Only two things have happened to me since I went on board the
_Ribot_ which you don’t know all about,” she was adding, “and which
had any connection with the secret I was keeping from you. One was
my meeting with De Trevenac. He stopped me on the street, supposing
I was a German agent. He gave me the orders which I told you he gave
to someone else.”

“I was supposing,” Gerry replied, “that the entire truth about De
Trevenac was something like that.”

“You know the entire truth about him now,” Ruth said. “What I told
you before I specifically said was not the entire truth.”

Gerry winced a little as he turned toward her. “Don’t think I’m
holding that against you--if you’re Ruth Alden, as you say. Only if
you’re German----”

“German!” Ruth refused the word with a gasp. “Gerry, you can’t
believe that.”

“What was the other episode?” he asked quickly; and now she told him
about George Byrne; of her attempt to continue to deceive him; of
his mistaking her for his love; then his discovery of the truth and
their talk in the ruined house; of Byrne’s accusation and arrest of
her; of the irruption of the German and his attack; his repetition
of the order to her to go to Switzerland; and of her waiting since.

“I told him when he accused me and I could not make him believe,
that you would know about me, Gerry!” she cried. “I thought
everything would be all right if only I could get you! And oh--oh
I’ve wanted you to come ever since!”

She did not mean to say that, he saw; it was not possible that this
cry was planned and practiced for effect. It burst so unbidden, so
unguarded from her breast; and seized upon him like her hand--her
small, soft, strong little hand--closing upon his heart. It told to
him a thousand times better than all the words she had just said, of
her loneliness and fears and dreads fought out all by herself in her
wild, solitary, desperate adventure. And Gerry, gazing down at her,
did not ask himself again whether he believed. Instead he saw her
once more as first he had seen her at Mrs. Corliss’, and his heart
compressed as never it had before as he thought of her, a little
office girl making twenty-five dollars a week, coming to that big,
rich house not knowing who or what she would meet there and standing
up so singly and alone for her country and her faith; he saw her
again as she was on the _Ribot_, surrounded by new terrors and with
perils to her increasing day by day and playing her part so well;
and now passions and sensations which he had fought and had tried to
put off, overwhelmed him again. He felt her, wet and small with all
her clothing clinging to her as he had taken her from a sailor’s
arms and she, looking up at him, had tried so bravely and defiantly
to deny what her cries had just confessed to all the ship--that she
was his; she had gone into the sea for him. He saw and heard and
felt her hands upon him again as he lay helpless under the wreck of
his airplane and she worked beside him, coolly and well, though
machine-gun bullets were striking all about her; and she had freed
him. The sensation of their ride together returned while he had been
almost helpless in the seat of the truck watching her drive and
listening while she talked to him of another man whom she had
liked--the English officer, who had been killed, “1583.”

As Gerry had envied that other man his comradeship with this girl,
now jealousy rose for the man who, for the wanton moments of his
tragic mistake, had possessed himself of her. She had not wished it;
she had submitted to his arms, to his kisses only perforce. She had
said, indeed, that she had not quite succeeded in submitting; and
Gerry found himself rejoicing in that. But another man had held her;
another had kissed her in full passion; and Gerry was dazed to find
now how he felt at that.

He had known that she had been his almost from the first; but he had
not known that he had wanted her his until he had had to think of
her as having been someone else’s.

He gazed down at her now, little, sweet, more beautiful than she had
ever seemed to him before, and alone in danger; and his arms
hungered to hold her; his face burned with blood running hot to
press warm lips against hers. He wanted to feel with her all that
any other man had felt; and she--she would not put him off. But
instead, he had to judge her. So he stood away, his hands behind his
back, one hand locked tight on the other wrist.

“Well,” he said, “I’m here; what do you want me to do?”

“You’ll do it for me, Gerry?”

“What?”

“Help me to Switzerland.”

“Still as Cynthia Gail, of course.”

“Yes.”

“Then you turn into--whom?”

“The German girl whom they will take into Germany.”

“I suppose so. But who is she? Where does she come from? What is her
name?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?”

“She came from Chicago, I suppose.”

“You suppose; and you don’t know even her name and intend to try to
be her!”

“It’s possible, Gerry; oh it’s possible, truly. You see I don’t
believe the Germans here in Paris, or those who’ll meet me in
Switzerland, know who I’m supposed to be.”

“What do you think they’ll know?”

“That the girl who’s here going under the name of Cynthia Gail, and
doing the work I’m doing, is really one of themselves and that
she’ll appear in Lucerne. Those are the essentials; and so far as
I’ve been able to observe the German-spy system--and you see I’ve
been a part of it for a while----”

“Yes; I see.”

“--it seems pretty well reduced to communicating just essentials. Of
course I’ve prepared a German-American name and identity for myself.
If they really know anything in Germany about the girl whom their
Chicago people sent here, they’ll have me; but if they don’t, I’ll
get on. That’s the part I’ve really been preparing myself for all
these months, Gerry; just being Cynthia Gail here was--nothing.”

He felt himself jerk and recoil at that. Had she been playing a part
with him all this time as well as to others; had this being his been
only a rôle which she had acted?

“I see,” he said to her curtly.

“Oh, not nothing to me, Gerry, in the things I’ve had to do when I
wrote Cynthia’s mother and father and when I had to write George
Byrne and when I’ve been seeing her brother. I meant that deceiving
Hubert and his aunt and her friends here and the rest and you,
Gerry, was--” she did not finish.

“Quite simple,” he completed for her with relief. So the deception
with him had not been hard because, in what would have been hard,
she had not deceived him. “Where’s Hubert?” Gerry questioned now.

“I don’t know. I don’t think he’s in Paris, now.”

“You haven’t heard from him recently?”

“He sent me several postals when I was at Mirevaux; I’ve not heard
from him since.”

“Then he knows nothing whatever about this?”

“He doesn’t know that George Byrne found me, Gerry; but he knows I’m
not Cynthia Gail.”

“Ah! So you told him some time ago, did you?” Jealousy of Hubert now
leaped in him; Hubert had known of her what he could not know.

“I didn’t tell him; or I didn’t mean to, Gerry,” Ruth explained. “He
knew about me--that is, about Cynthia Gail, of course--and he asked
me questions on the train coming here from Bordeaux which I had to
answer and answered wrongly.”

“Oh; he caught you, then; he told you so!”

“He caught me, Gerry; but he didn’t tell me so,” Ruth corrected. “I
didn’t know at all that I’d given him answers which he knew were
false until I found out some family facts from Charles Gail here the
other day. Hubert must have known I wasn’t Cynthia, but----”

“What?”

“I guess he trusted to me, myself, that I could not be against our
cause.”

She had not attempted to make a rebuke of that reply; but Gerry felt
it.

“Hub hadn’t been put in my position, Ruth,” he defended himself. “He
hadn’t been made responsible for you--in France.”

“I think that he felt himself wholly responsible for me, Gerry,”
Ruth replied, coloring warmly as she thought of the complete loyalty
of her strange friend. “Only he felt willing to accept the
responsibility.”

“But he did not know what you were doing!” Gerry protested. “He did
not know that you were accused as a spy!”

“No,” Ruth said; then, “So I am accused, Gerry?”

“Byrne accused you, you said. Inquiries certainly have been made;
that puts another problem up to a man.”

“Yes,” she said. But he knew, as he gazed down at her, that she was
thinking that Hubert would have trusted her just the same.

Was she manipulating him now, Gerry wondered? Was it possible that
this girl had been playing with and utilizing him in what had just
passed? Had George Byrne come and had all happened which she had
told him or was it conceivable that she had contrived the whole
story, or distorted it for effect upon him to anticipate accusation
against her from other quarters? Had Hubert really found out about
her; or was that too invented for the sake of flicking him into
blind espousal of her plans? Flashes of such sort fought with every
natural reaction to remembrance of his own close comradeship with
her. Impossible; impossible! his impulses iterated to him. But his
four years in France had taught him that the impossible in
relations, in understandings, in faiths and associations between man
and man and man and woman had ceased to exist. In this realization,
at least, his situation was truly distinct from Hubert’s. He
believed in her; at least, he wished to tear his hands apart from
their clench together behind him; he longed to extend them to her;
he burned at thought of lifting her again and feeling her weight in
his arms; and when he looked at her lips, it fired flame to his;
yet----

“I don’t flatter myself that I can control the report which is being
compiled about you, Ruth Alden,” he said. “What I have said, and may
say, will only be a part of the data which will determine what’s to
be done with you. For you realize, now, that one thing or the
other’s to be done.”

“I realize that, Gerry,” she said.

“You know that in one case they must arrest you and try you--by
court-martial.”

“Yes.”

“I may--I don’t know! God help you and me, Ruth Alden, I don’t know
yet--I may have to give part of the evidence which will accuse you!
But though I do--and after I’ve done it--you must know that I’ll be
fighting for you, believing in spite of facts which I may be bound
to witness, that you somehow are all right. I’ll be trying to save
you. I suppose that sounds mad to you; but it’s true.”

“It doesn’t sound mad to me.”

“In the other case,” he went on, “in case I can decide honestly with
myself that you cannot possibly be doing anything one jot to
threaten our cause, and in case Byrne has died or does not speak,
then probably you will be passed on to Switzerland and you’ll try to
go into Germany.”

Ruth waited without reply.

“Do you see what you’re putting up to me? You’re making me either
accuse you to the French and cause you to be imprisoned and tried;
or, if I believe and let them believe that you’re American, I must
know that I’m sending you on into Germany to face a German firing
squad. For they’ll shoot you down, as they did Edith Cavell, when
they catch you; and they’ll catch you! You haven’t a chance and you
know it! So give it up--give it up, I say! Go tomorrow and cancel
your request; go home or stay here and work only as you have been
doing.”

“And when I’m taking my train of refugees out of the villages in the
next zone where they strike, know again that I might have done some
bit to prevent it and--I was afraid? What can you think of me? Do
you think I could have done all that I’ve told you I have just for
the sake of working here in Paris? Do you think I could see death
come to so many and care how it comes to me?”

“It’s not just death,” Gerry said, quivering as he gazed down at
her. “If I could be sure they’d just kill you, it might be easier to
leave your affairs to you. Who owns the right to refuse another his
way to die? But you’re a girl. At first when they may think you one
of themselves, you may be safe; but then they’ll discover you. A
man--or what passes in Germany for a man--probably will find you
out. He----”

Gerry could say no more; for a moment his resistance to himself
broke and his hands seized her. “They shan’t!” he denied to her
fiercely. “They shan’t!”

Gently she raised a hand and, as she had upon that occasion before,
she loosened the grasp of his fingers.

“You’re not to think about what could happen to me; you must think
only of what I may do, Gerry,” she said.

He released her, as he had before; but this time he caught the
fingers which opposed his; he bent quickly and, carrying her hand to
his lips, he kissed it.

He drew back from her then; and she closed her other hand over the
fingers which he had kissed and, so holding, she stood gazing up at
him under lashes wet with tears.

“I’m going now,” he said abruptly. “What I’ll have to do about
you--I don’t know. I suppose you realize that since you’ve applied
for _permission_ for Switzerland, and since I’ve been questioned
about you, probably you are under special observation. So whatever
you think I may be doing about you, you’d better not attempt to move
for the present.”

“I don’t expect to make any move at all--unless I receive my
_permission_ for Switzerland,” Ruth said.

“All right.” He turned away and looked for his cap in the corner
where he had left it; then he came back and briefly said good night.

Out upon the street with the darkness enveloping him, misgivings
tormented him again. The little, dim Rue des Saints Pères was quiet
and almost deserted; all Paris seemed hushed. The spring warmth of
the evening which, in another year, would have brought stir and
gladness which would have thronged the avenues with folk upon idle,
joyous errands tonight brought only oppression. Paris, Gerry knew,
denied danger; yet Paris and, with Paris, all of France; and, with
France, all Europe; and, with Europe, America and the rest of the
world lay menaced that April night as they had not been since the
September of the Marne.

For in the great bulge in the battle line which the enemy had thrust
between Amiens and Paris, the Germans had established firmly their
positions and there they rested, while to the north beyond Arras
they were striking their second tremendous blow and had overrun
Armentières and were rushing on toward Calais and the Channel.

Gerry strode on with consciousness of these events almost physically
pressing upon him. In their presence, what was he with his
prejudices and passions, what was that girl who had seared his lips
when he pressed them against her fingers so that still for many
moments afterwards his lips burned and tingled? If she was a German
spy who had been deluding and playing with him, to permit her to
proceed now might work further catastrophe incalculable; whereas
were she what he believed--yes; he believed--she could do no good
but must merely destroy herself if allowed to go on. Had he any
choice but to take the only action which could prevent her?

Ruth had waited alone in the little parlor after he had gone, with
her left hand clasped protectingly over the fingers which he had
kissed; protectingly she kept that clasp while, standing at the
window, she had watched his figure disappear in the darkness of the
street of the Holy Fathers. Her fingers were hot like his lips; and
while that heat still was strong, she brought her hand to her cheek
and pressed it there.

That night nothing else occurred; nor upon the next day and night,
nor during the following week did Ruth hear from Gerry as to what he
had done about her; and she encountered nothing to indicate his
decision until, calling again about her request for travel in
Switzerland, suddenly she found permission granted, whereupon she
took the first train for the east of France and the next morning
passed the border into Switzerland. Accordingly it was in the shadow
of Mount Pilatus that she read in a Bern newspaper that three days
previously the American ace, Gerry Hull, had been shot down while
flying over the German lines; but that his companions in the flight,
who had returned, reported that, though falling in enemy territory,
he seemed to have succeeded in making some sort of a landing; so it
was possible that he was not killed but might be a prisoner in the
hands of the Germans.




CHAPTER XVI: INTO GERMANY


The little Republic of Switzerland, always one of the most
interesting spots in the world, became during this war a most
amazing and anomalous country. Completely surrounded by four great
powers at war--and itself peopled by citizens each speaking the
tongue of one or another of its neighbors and each allied by blood
with one or with two or with three, or, perhaps, with all--the Swiss
Confederation suffered a complex of passions, sympathies, and
prejudices quite beyond possible parallel elsewhere. And, as
everyone knows, the Swiss Republic during the four years of the war,
successfully persisted in peace.

Peace! What a strange condition in which to live, Ruth wondered with
herself as she encountered the astonishments on every hand when she
had crossed the border. She had been in a country at war for not
quite three months--unless you nominated America from April, 1917,
to January, 1918, a nation at war. Ruth did not. As she thought of
her life before she took ship for France, the date of America’s
declaration of a state of war with the Imperial German government
was not fixed in the fiber of her feelings as were many other days
before the date of that declaration--the September 6 of the Marne,
the May 7 of the _Lusitania_, the glorious weeks of the defense of
Verdun. The war declaration of April 6, 1917, seemed now to Ruth but
a sort of official notification of the intentions of the American
people which since then had only continued to develop. That home
country which she had left in the last days of January was not
nearly so different from its peace-time self as war-time France had
proved distinct from war-time America.

Certainly Ruth’s life had run on almost unchanged by the American
declaration of war, save for the strengthening of her futile,
stifled passions. But that day in January, which had embarked her
for France, had ushered her into a realm which demanded dealings in
realities which swiftly had made all before seem illusory and
phantasmagorical.

The feeling of dreamland incredulity that she, Ruth Alden, could
actually be experiencing those gloriously exciting days upon the
_Ribot_ and following her arrival in France had been supplanted by
sensations which made it seem that these last weeks had been the
only real ones in her life. When she thought of her old self--of
that strange, shadowy, almost substanceless girl who used to work in
a Madison Street real estate office for Sam Hilton--it was her life
in Chicago which had become incredible. She did not, therefore,
forget her own home; on the contrary, her work which had been
largely the gathering together of scattered family groups and the
attempt to reestablish homes, had made her dwell with particular
poignancy upon memories of the little house in Onarga where her
mother and her sisters dwelt. Regularly Ruth had addressed a letter
to her mother and dropped it in a post-box; she had dared tell
nothing of herself or of her work or give any address by which
anyone could trace her. She simply endeavored to send to her mother
assurance that she was well and in France. Obviously she could not
receive reply from her mother; indeed, Ruth could have no knowledge
that any of her letters ever reached home. She experienced the
dreads which every loving person feels when no news can come; such
experience was only part of the common lot there in France; but it
helped to remove her life at home further into the past.

Switzerland, strangely and without warning, had undone much that
France and the battle zone had worked within Ruth; the inevitable
relaxing of the strain of work in a country at war had returned Ruth
to earlier emotions. What was she, Ruth Alden, doing here alone in
the Alps? She was standing, as one in a dream, upon the quay before
the splendid hotels of Lucerne and gazing over the blue, wonderful,
mountain-mirroring waters of the Lac des Quatre Cantons. Off to the
southwest, grand and rugged against the azure sky, rose the
snow-capped peaks of Pilatus; to the east, glistening and more
smiling under the spring sun, lay the Rigi. The beauty and wonder of
it was beyond anything which Ruth Alden could have known. Who was
she that she was there?

Then a boy came by with newspapers and she bought a German newspaper
and one printed in French at Bern. It was this one which informed
her, when she glanced down its columns, that Gerry Hull had been
shot down, and, strangely--and mercifully, perhaps--this knowledge
came not to the girl who, during the past months had been his
friend, his close comrade during days most recent; it seemed to
come, somehow, only to a girl who lay awake early in the morning in
a shabby room at an Ontario Street boarding house, a girl who
day-dreamed about impossible happenings such as knowing Gerry Hull,
but who soon must stir to go down to breakfast at the disorderly
table in the ill-lit room below and then catch a crowded car for Sam
Hilton’s office.

Such was the work of peace and Pilatus and the Rigi and the images
upon the lake. War--war which had become the only reality, the sole
basis of being--miraculously had vanished. She passed through
throngs speaking German and by other groups conversing in French;
these stood side by side, neither one prisoner to the other; they
had no apparent hostility or animosity. These people, in part at
least, were German and French; but there beyond the border--Ruth
gazed in the direction of Alsace--men of such sorts sprang at one
another with bayonets; and Gerry Hull had been shot down.

Ruth searched the German newspaper for further word of him; she
looked up a news-stand and bought several papers, both French and
German. In some she discovered the same brief announcement of the
fate of the American pilot; but no further information. But it was
certain that he was dead or a prisoner--wounded, probably, or at
least injured by the crash of his airplane in the “some sort of a
landing” which he had succeeded in making. It had been “some sort of
a landing” which he had made that time he was shot down when she had
gone to him and helped him free. Tales of German treatment of their
prisoners--tales which she could not doubt, having been told her by
men who themselves had suffered--recurred to her and brought her out
of this pleasant, peaceful Lethe from realities in which Lucerne,
for a few hours, had let her live. Tension returned; and, with the
tension, grief but not tears; instead, that determination imbued her
which she had witnessed often enough in others, when loss of their
own was made known to them. Gerry Hull, she thus knew, was her own;
and as she had seen men and women in France giving themselves for
the general cause, and for one particular, personal vengeance, too,
so Ruth thought of her errand into Germany no longer as solely to
gather information for the army but to find and free Gerry Hull, if
he was a prisoner; and if he was killed, then to take some special,
personal vengeance for him.

She had come to Lucerne--ostensibly--to rest and to recuperate; and
Mrs. Mayhew had given her letters to friends who were staying at one
of the large hotels. Ruth had registered at the same hotel and a
Mrs. Folwell, an American, had taken Ruth under her chaperonage.
Ruth’s name, upon the hotel register, of course stood as Cynthia
Gail; and as Miss Gail, she met other guests in the hotel, which was
one of those known as an “allied hotel” in the row of splendid
buildings upon the water front devoted to the great Swiss peace and
war _industrie des étrangers_. The majority of its guests, that is,
designated themselves as English or French, Italian or
American--whatever in fact they might be. The minority laid claim to
neutral status--Norwegian, Danish, Hollandish, Swedish, Spanish. But
everyone recognized that in this hotel, as in all the others, the
Germans and Austrians possessed representatives among the guests as
well as among the servants.

“It is the best procedure,” Mrs. Folwell said half seriously to Ruth
upon her arrival, “to lay out all your correspondence upon your
table when you leave the room so that it may be examined, in your
absence, with the least possible disturbance. They will see it
anyway.”

Ruth was quite willing. Indeed, she was desirous of advertising, as
quickly as possible, the presence of “Cynthia Gail.” She had taken
the trouble to learn a simple device, employing ordinary toilet
powder and pin perforations through sheets of paper, which would
disclose whether the pages of a letter had been disturbed.
Accordingly she prepared her letters, and, merely locking them in
her bureau drawer, she left them in her room. Returning some hours
later, and unlocking the drawer, she found all her letters
apparently undisturbed; but the powder and the perforation proved
competent to evidence that secret examination had been made.

Of course examination might have been at the hands of allied agents;
for Ruth did not imagine that the Germans and Austrians alone
concerned themselves with war-time visitors to Switzerland; but she
felt sure that the Germans had made their search also.

After breakfast the next morning Ruth met a man of twenty-eight or
thirty--tall, reddish-haired, and with small gray eyes by name
Christian Wessels, known as a Norwegian gentleman who had made
himself agreeable to the Americans at the hotel. He was an ardent
admirer of American policies and could repeat verbatim the statement
of American war aims given by President Wilson to Congress three
months before. He was a young man of culture, having graduated from
the Swedish University of Upsala and was now corresponding with the
University of Copenhagen. He proved to be a man of cosmopolitan
acquaintance who had visited London, New York, San Francisco. He
spoke English perfectly; and he nursed profound, personal antipathy
to Germany as his family fortunes had suffered enormously through
the torpedoing of Norwegian ships; moreover, he himself had been
traveling from England to Bergen when his ship was destroyed and he
had been exposed to winter weather in an open boat for five days
before being picked up. He was only now recuperating from the
effects of that exposure, meanwhile carrying on certain economic
studies to guide trade relations after the war.

His method of recuperation, Ruth observed, was to eat as heavily and
as often as occasions permitted; he was a sleek, sensuous young man,
ease-loving and, by his own account, a connoisseur of the arts. He
talked informatively about painting, as about politics. Ruth did not
like him; but when she encountered him as she was wandering about
alone gazing at the quaint houses in the interior of the old town,
she could not be too rude to him when he offered himself as a guide.

“You have seen the Kapellbrücke, Miss Gail?”

“Yes; of course,” Ruth said.

“And the historical paintings? You understand them?”

“Yes,” Ruth asserted again.

“To what do they refer?”

“I don’t know,” Ruth admitted, and accompanied him, in no wise
offended, back to the old bridge over the Reuss; then to the
Mühlenbrücke with its Dance of Death; next he took her away to the
Glacier Garden.

While they had been in the town with many people close by, his
manner to Ruth had not been unusually offensive; but when they were
away alone, he became more familiar and he took to uncovert
appraisal of her face and figure.

“You are younger than I had expected,” he commented to her, apropos
of nothing which had gone before but his too steady scrutiny of her
face and her figure.

“I did not know that you expected anything in regard to me,” Ruth
said. “Mrs. Folwell did not know I was coming until I arrived.”

“Ah! But your orders were given you--the thirtieth of last month,
were they not?”

Ruth stiffened. The thirtieth of last month was the day upon which
she had arrived in Paris from Compiègne, the day upon which she had
visited Charles Gail and, upon her return to the Rue des Saints
Pères, had met George Byrne. Only one order had been given her that
day; and that order had been given by the German who struck down
Byrne. No one else had known about that order but herself and the
German; she had told Gerry and he might have told it to the French
authorities. But she could not associate this sleek, sensuously
unpleasant person, going by the name of Wessels, with anyone whom
Gerry could have informed. She readily could connect him with the
German who had for her attempted to strike Byrne dead; and she had
been awaiting--impatiently awaiting--the German agent here at
Lucerne who must accost her.

“Yes; the thirtieth,” Ruth said.

“Then why did you not come sooner?”

“I applied at once for permission,” Ruth defended herself. “It was
delayed.”

“Ah! Then you had much difficulty?”

“Delay,” Ruth repeated. “That was all; though I may have been
investigated.”

“You used Hull again to help you, I suppose.”

“Yes, I used Hull,” Ruth said.

Her heart was palpitating feverishly and the compression in her
throat almost choked her while she fought for outward calm. She was
a German girl, she must remember; she had come from her great peril;
she had passed it; this was relief and refuge with one of her own
before whom, at last, she could freely speak; for--though she dared
not yet fully act upon the conviction--she no longer doubted at all
that this Wessels was the enemy agent who was to control her
henceforth. How much did he know about her, or about the girl she
was supposed to be? He knew that she had been ordered here on the
thirtieth of last month; he knew that she had at times “used” Gerry
Hull.

“We have him now, you know,” Wessels said, watching her with his
disagreeable, close scrutiny.

“He’s captured?” Ruth said. She had remembered that she must have no
real concern for the fate of an enemy pilot whom she had “used.”

“Dead or captured; anyway, we have him,” Wessels assured. He had
continued to speak to her in English, though no one was near them;
and if anyone did overhear, the German tongue certainly would arouse
no comment in Lucerne. “Mecklen seems to have only half-done your
other flame.”

In his conversation at the hotel he had affected the use of slang to
display his complete familiarity with English, Ruth had noticed; and
she caught his meaning instantly. Her other flame was George Byrne,
of course; Mecklen, who had “only half-done” him, must be the German
of the ruined house.

“Byrne did not die?” Ruth asked.

“Who’s Byrne?” Wessels returned. “The American infantry lieutenant?”

“Yes.”

“No; he did not die. Mecklen shut his mouth; but any day now it may
open. When you did not come, I thought it had.”

“His mouth opened?”

“Yes; we had better walk, perhaps. There are many more places of
great interest. I shall show them to you.”

He pointed Ruth ahead of him down a narrow way; and when she
proceeded obediently, he followed.

She welcomed the few moments offered for consideration. So George
Byrne had not died! That was a weight from her heart; and Wessels
had only fragmentary facts about her, however he had received them.
He knew that she had had another “flame,” an American infantry
lieutenant; but Wessels had not known his name.

“You were lucky to get here,” Wessels offered, coming up beside her
when the way widened. Their direction was farther out from the city
and they continued to be quite alone. “But it cooks your chance to
go back.”

“To France, you mean?”

“Where else?”

She had thought of the possibility of being dispatched from
Switzerland not into Germany, but back to France. If someone was to
meet her at Lucerne who could take complete report upon the matters
which she had been supposed to observe, the logical action would be
to return her to work again behind the allied lines. Her original
instructions, received in Chicago, had only implied--they had not
directly stated--that she was to go on into Germany; but she had
clung to the belief that she would go on. And now the failure of
Mecklen to fully do his work with Byrne had settled that doubt for
Ruth; for with Byrne alive and likely at any day to “open his
mouth,” obviously the Germans would not order her into the hands of
the French.

“We may use you in Russia or Greece; but not France for the present,
or even Italy,” Wessels said. “But first you can visit home, if you
like.”

He meant the Fatherland, home of the girl whom he believed Ruth to
be; and Ruth knew that she had come to the crisis. If the
fragmentary facts which had been forwarded to this man comprised any
account of the girl whom the Germans in Chicago had meant to locate
and whom they had failed to find when they entrusted their mission
to Ruth, she was stopped now. If not....

“I’d like to look in at the old home,” Ruth said.

“Where is it? What town?”

“My grandfather lived near Losheim.”

“Where is that?”

“It is a tiny town beyond Saarlouis; near the Hoch Wald.”

“Oh, yes; I know. What is your name?”

“Luise Brun,” Ruth said. There was a German girl of that name who
had lived in Onarga; Ruth had gone to high school with her and had
known her well. During the early days of the war, Luise had told
Ruth about her relatives in Germany--her grandfather, who had lived
near Losheim until he died the winter before, and her two cousins,
both of whom had been killed fighting. Ruth did not resemble Luise
Brun in any way; and she did not imagine that she could go to
Losheim and pass for Luise; but when questioned about herself, she
had far more detailed knowledge of Luise’s connections to borrow for
her own use than she had had of Cynthia Gail’s.

Wessels, however, appeared less interested in Ruth’s German
relatives than in herself. “You have been in America most of your
life?” he asked.

“When I was a baby I was brought to Losheim and again when I was a
little girl,” Ruth said. “My father and mother never forgot the
Fatherland.”

“Of course not,” Wessels accepted, impatient of this loyal
protestation and desirous to return to the more personal. “I was
saying you are much like an American girl. American girls, I must
admit, attract me.”

He began speaking to her suddenly in German; and Ruth replied in
German as best she could, conscious that her accent was far from
perfect.

It appeared to pass with him, however, as the sort of pronunciation
to be expected from a girl reared in America.

“How old are you now, Luise?” he questioned familiarly.

“Twenty-five.”

“Yet _eines mädchen_, I warrant.”

“I am not married, Herr Baron,” Ruth assured, employing the address
to one of title. Either he was a possessor of baronial rank and
pleased with the recognition of the fact, or the assignment of the
rank was gratifying and he did not correct her.

“And in America you have no sweetheart of your own--other than your
‘flames?’”

He spoke the slang word in English, referring to Byrne and to Gerry
Hull, with both of whom, as he believed, she had merely played.

“No one, Herr Baron,” Ruth denied, but colored warmly. He took this
flush for confession that she was hiding an attachment; and he
laughed.

“No matter, Luise; he is not here.”

He was indulgently more familiar with her--a _von_ something or
other, admitting pleasure with the daughter of a man of no rank who
had emigrated to America. Ruth brought up the business between them
to halt further acceleration of this familiarity.

“I am to make my report to you, Herr Baron?”

“Report? Ah, yes! No; of course not. Why should you make report here
now? It is simply trouble to record and transmit it. You are not
going back to France, I said, did I not?”

“Yes.”

“Then the report will be tomorrow.”

“Where, Herr Baron?”

“Where I take you to--headquarters.”

Ruth went weak and gasped in spite of herself. She had thought that
she was prepared to meet any fate; but now she knew that she had
built upon encountering her risks more gradually. To be taken to
“headquarters”--_das Hauptquartier_--tomorrow! And, though Gerry had
warned her, and she had said that she had recognized and accepted
every sort of danger, still she had not reckoned upon such a
companion as this man for her journey.

“Ha, Luise! What is the matter?”

“When do we start, Herr Baron?”

“The sooner the better; surely you are ready?”

“Surely; I was thinking--” she groped for excuse and could think of
nothing better than, “What way do we go?”

“By Basel and Freiburg.”

“What time, if you please, Herr Baron?”

“At eight o’clock the train is.”

“I would like to return now to the hotel, then.”

He complied and, conversing on ordinary topics in English, they
reentered the town.

She had no arrangements to make. Wessels was to see to all necessary
details. She could pack her traveling bags in a few minutes; and she
dared not write to anyone of the matters now upon her mind. She
desired to return to the hotel only to be alone; and, as soon as she
had parted from Wessels, she shut herself in her room.

Long ago--a period passed in incalculable terms of time--she had
determined, locked alone in a room, to undertake proceeding into
Germany. Her purpose from the first, and her promise to the soul of
Cynthia Gail--the vindication which she had whispered to strengthen
herself when she was writing to Cynthia’s parents, and George Byrne,
and when she was receiving their letters, trading upon Cynthia’s
mother’s friends--was that she was to go into Germany.

It must be at tremendous risk to herself; but she always had
recognized that; she had said to Gerry that she accepted certain
death--and worse than death--if first she might have her chance to
do something. Well, she might have her chance. At any rate, there
was nothing to be done but go ahead without futilely calculating who
Wessels actually was, what he truly believed about her, what he
meant to do. Here was her chance to enter Germany.

An hour later she descended to dinner with Mrs. Folwell, and noticed
Wessels dining at his usual table in another part of the room. Ruth
informed Mrs. Folwell after dinner that she was starting that
evening for Basel; it was then almost train time and, after having
her luggage brought down, she went alone to the train.

Wessels also was at the train, but he halted only a moment beside
her to give her an envelope with tickets and other necessary papers.
Ruth entered a compartment shared by two women--German women or
German-speaking Swiss, both of middle age, both suspicious of the
stranger and both uneasily absorbed with their own affairs. No one
else entered; the guard locked the door and the train proceeded
swiftly, and with much screeching of its whistle, through darkened
valleys, through pitch-black, roaring tunnels, out upon slopes, down
into valleys again.

Late at night the two women slept. Ruth tried to recline in a
corner; and repeatedly endeavored to relax in sleep; but each time,
just before the dissolution of slumber, she started up stiff and
strained. Dawn had not come when the women awoke and the train
pulled into Basel. It was still dark when, after the halt at the
city, all doors again were opened and everyone ordered to leave the
cars. This was the German border.

Ruth stepped out with the others and rendered up her luggage. She
was aligning herself with the women awaiting the ordeal of the
German examination, when Wessels appeared with a porter, who was
bearing Ruth’s bags. He passed without halting or speaking to her;
but a moment later a German official touched her arm and, pointing
her to go on, he escorted her past the doors before which the others
were in line for examination. He brought her to the train which was
standing on the German side and showed her to an empty compartment,
where her luggage lay in the racks. Ruth sat in the compartment
watching the people--men and women--as they issued from the depot of
examination; they went to different cars of the waiting train; but
when anyone attempted to enter the compartment where Ruth sat, a
guard forbade until Wessels reappeared, got in, and told the guard
to lock the door.

Immediately the train started.

“Welcome to the Fatherland, _Liebchen_!” said Wessels, drawing close
beside Ruth as the car gathered speed and rushed deeper into
Germany.




CHAPTER XVII: THE ROAD TO LAUENGRATZ


Ruth moved from him and to the end of the seat. He laughed and again
edged up to her.

“Where are we bound?” Ruth asked.

“That’s up to you.”

“How?”

“I send you one place, if you cut up; a more pleasant one, if you do
not.”

“What are the two places?”

“The first I may leave to your heated imagination; the other--it is
quite pretty, I assure you. Particularly in the spring, with all
nature budding to increase. I own it--in the Schwarzwald, near
Biberach. You know the Schwarzwald?”

“No,” Ruth said.

“Indeed; it is not so far from Losheim.”

He put a taunt into his tone--confident, mocking raillery; and Ruth
knew that he had discovered her; she recognized that from the very
first, probably, he had known about her and that she had never
deceived him. Whether he had received information prior to her
appearance that she was not to be trusted, or whether she had
betrayed herself to him, she could not know; and now it scarcely
mattered. The fact was that he was aware that she was not of the
Germans and that he had brought her into Germany with power to
punish her as might appeal to him.

“Then you do not know Lauengratz?” he went on.

“No,” Ruth said.

“You do not call me Herr Baron now, _Liebchen_,” he reproached,
patting her face.

Ruth made no reply but the futile movement of slipping to the
cushions opposite, where he permitted her to sit alone, contenting
himself by leaning back and smirking at her.

He continued to speak to her in English, except for his native
_liebchens_, to show off his perfect familiarity with her language.
For he entirely abandoned all pretense of believing her anything but
American. Near Lauengratz, he informed her, was his favorite estate,
where, when he wished, even the war would not unpleasantly intrude;
he trusted that she would have the good sense to wish to visit
Lauengratz.

Dawn was brightening, and Wessels--Ruth did not yet know his true
name--switched off the lights in the compartment, lifted the
curtains and motioned to the right and ahead, where, along the
length of Baden, lay the wooded hills of his Schwarzwald--the Black
Forest. The gray light, sweeping over the sky, showed Ruth the
wooded slopes reaching down toward the Rhine, which had formed the
Swiss-German boundary at Basel, but which now flowed almost due
north between the German grand duchy of Baden and the German
Imperial Territory of Alsace, within the western edge of which now
ran the French and American battle line.

Four railroads, Ruth knew, reached from Basel into Germany--one west
of the Rhine to Mühlhausen; one almost due east and up the river
valley to the Rhinefall; one northeast to Todtnau; the other north
and parallel with the Rhine to Freiburg and Karlsruhe. The train
evidently was traveling this last road with the Rhine valley dimly
in sight to the west. There had come to Ruth the wholly irrational
sensation that Germany, when at last seen, must appear a land
distinct from all others; but nothing in this quiet countryside,
which was disclosing itself to greater and greater distance under
the brightening dawn, was particularly alarming or peculiar. She
viewed a fair and beautiful land of forest, and farm, and tiny, neat
villages very like the Swiss, and with not so many soldiers in
evidence about them as Ruth had noticed upon the Swiss side of the
frontier.

Perhaps it was the appearance of this fair, quiet countryside which
spared Ruth from complete dismay; perhaps, deep within her, she had
always realized that her venture must prove inevitably fatal, and
this realization now controlled her reactions as well as her
conscious thought; perhaps she was one of those whom despair
amazingly arms with coolness and resource.

“I will go with you to Lauengratz,” Ruth replied.

“That’s good!” He patted the seat beside him. “Come back here now.”

Ruth recognized that she must obey or he would seize her; so she
returned to the other seat and suffered his arm about her.

“You do not recall me, _Liebchen_?” he asked indulgently.

He referred, obviously, to some encounter previous to their very
recent meetings in Lucerne. Ruth could recollect no such occasion,
but she feared to admit it lest she offend his vanity. And, indeed,
now that he suggested that they had met before, his features became
to her, not familiar, but it seemed that she had seen him before.

“Didn’t I see you in Paris, Herr Baron?” she ventured boldly.

“In Paris precisely,” he confirmed, boastfully.

“I would have placed you, if I had thought about the possibility of
your having been in Paris,” Ruth explained.

“Ah! Why should I not have been there? A Norwegian gentleman,
shipwrecked from a vessel torpedoed by the horrid Huns!” He laughed,
self-flatteringly, and squeezed Ruth tighter. “A kiss, _Liebchen_! I
swear, if you are a loyal girl, surely you’ll say I deserve a kiss!”

He bent his head to take his reward; and Ruth, unable fully to
oppose him, contented herself with turning her cheek, avoiding touch
of his lips upon hers. It satisfied him, or he was in such excellent
humor with himself that he let it content him for the moment.

The loathing which his embrace stirred within her and the helpless
fury for repulse of him called clear images from Ruth’s
subconsciousness.

“About two weeks ago--” she began.

“A week ago Thursday, _Liebchen_.”

“You brought a child for clothing to the relief rooms where I was
working. I waited upon you.”

“And following your excellent explanation of your wonderful work,
_Liebchen_, I gave you--” He halted to permit her to recount his
generosity.

“Two hundred francs, Herr Baron.”

“Ah! You do recollect. That deserves a kiss from me!” he cried, as
though she had given the other. Accordingly, he rewarded her as
before. “You remember the next time?”

“It was not there,” Ruth said vaguely. “It was upon the street.”

“Quite so. The Boulevard Madeleine. There was a widow--a
refugee--who halted you----”

Ruth remembered and took up the account. “She stopped me to try to
sell a bracelet, a family treasure----”

“Which you admired, I saw, _Liebchen_.”

“It was beautiful, but quite beyond my means to buy--at any fair
price for the poor woman,” Ruth explained.

“So I purchased it!” He went into a pocket and produced the
bracelet. “Put it on, _Liebchen_!” he bid, himself slipping it over
her hand. “Now another kiss for that!”

He took it.

“I did not know you were honoring me with your attentions all that
time, Herr Baron.”

“Oh, no trouble, _Liebchen_; a pleasure, I assure you. Besides, with
more than your prettiness you piqued curiosity. You see, I received
word in Paris when I am there before--a few months ago--that we can
confidently employ one who will appear as Cynthia Gail. The word
came from Chicago, I may tell you, quite roundabout and with some
difficulty. Before we learn more about you--well, Mecklen took it
upon himself to do you a little turn, it seems.”

Ruth merely nodded, waiting.

“Then a correction arrives from America, laying bare an
extraordinary circumstance, _Liebchen_. Our people in Chicago sent
us in January one Mathilde Igel, and now they have ascertained
beyond any possible doubt that two days before they dispatched
Mathilde to Paris, she has been interned in America. Who, then, have
our Chicago people sent to us and advised us to employ--who is this
Cynthia Gail? You would not need to be pretty to pique curiosity
now, would you, _Liebchen_?”

He petted her with mocking protectiveness as he spoke; and Ruth,
recoiling, at least had gained from him explanation of much about
which she had been uncertain. The Germans in Chicago, plainly, had
made such a mistake as she had supposed and had been long in
discovering it; longer, perhaps, in communicating knowledge of it to
Paris. But it had arrived in time to destroy her. Herr Baron
gratuitously continued his explanation.

“So I took it upon me, myself, to have a squint at our Cynthia and I
got my good look at you, _Liebchen_! What a pretty girl--how do you
Americans say it? A dazzler; indeed, a dazzler! What a needless pity
to add you to the total of destruction, already too great--you so
young and innocent and maidenly? I have never been in favor of
women’s intrusion in war; no, it is man’s business. For women, the
solacing of those who fight--whether with sword or by their wits
behind the enemy’s lines! Not so, _Liebchen_?”

It was broad daylight--a sunny, mild morning amid wooded hills and
vales with clear, rushing streams, with the Rhine Valley lost now to
the west as the railroad swept more closely to the Black Forest. The
train was slowing and, as it came to halt before a little
countryside station, Wessels took his arm from about Ruth and
refrained, for a few moments, from petting her; he went so far,
indeed, as to sit a little away from her so that anyone glancing
into the compartment would see merely a man and a girl traveling
together. Mad impulses had overwhelmed Ruth when she felt the train
to be slowing--impulses that she must be able to appeal to whoever
might be at the station to free her from this man; but sight of
those upon the platform instantly had cooled her. They were
soldiers--oxlike, servile soldiery who leaped forward when, from a
compartment ahead, a German officer signaled them for attention; or
they were peasant women and old men, only more unobtrusive and
submissive than the soldiers. Appeal to them against one of their
“gentlemen” and one who, too, undoubtedly was an officer! The idea
was lunacy; her sole chance was to do nothing to offend this man
while he flattered himself and boasted indulgently.

The train proceeded.

He put his arm about Ruth again. “So I took upon myself the
responsibility of saving you, _Liebchen_! You have yet done us no
harm, I say; you mean us harm, of course. But you have not yet had
the opportunity.”

Ruth caught breath. He did not know, then, of her betrayal of De
Trevenac? Or was he merely playing with her in this as in the rest?

“What is it, _Liebchen_?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“So I say to myself, I can let her go on and blunder across our
border in some way and, of course, surely be shot; or I may take a
little trouble about her myself and spare her. You do not make
yourself overthankful, _Liebchen_.”

“I am trying to, Herr Baron.”

“A kiss, darling, to your better success!” He gave it. “Now I will
have you compose yourself. A few more kilometers and the next stop
is ours. Lauengratz is not upon the railroad; it is not so modern,
nor is my family so new as that.”

He gazed out complacently while the train ran the few kilometers
swiftly. It drew into a tiny woodland station of the sort which Ruth
had frequently observed--a depot with switch tracks serving no
visible community, but with a traveled highway reaching back from it
toward a town hidden within the hills. No one waited here but the
station master and a man in the uniform of a military driver, who
stood near a large touring car. He was gazing at the train windows
and, seeing Wessels, he saluted. He came forward as the train
stopped and, when the compartment door was opened, he took Wessels’
traveling bag.

“Those in the racks, too,” Wessels directed curtly in German. Those
were Ruth’s; and she shrank back into the corner of the seat as the
man obediently took them down. Wessels stepped out upon the platform
and turned to Ruth.

No one else was leaving the train at that station; indeed, the door
of no other compartment opened. There was no one to whom Ruth might
appeal, even if appeal were possible. Wessels stood patiently in the
doorway; behind him rose quiet, beautiful woodland.

“Come,” he commanded Ruth, stretching a hand toward her.

She arose, neglecting his hand, and stepped from the train. The
guard closed the door behind her; immediately the train departed.
The station master--an old and shrunken man--approached, abjectedly,
to inquire whether Hauptmann von Forstner had desires. Herr
Hauptmann disclaimed any which he required the station master to
satisfy; and the old man retired swiftly to the kiosk at the farther
end of the platform.

The driver, who had finished securing the luggage behind his car,
opened the door of the tonneau and waited there at attention.

“Welcome to Lauengratz, _gnädiges Fräulein_.” Von Forstner dropped
the insulting _liebchens_ to employ his term of respectful and
gallant address; and before the soldier-servant he refrained from
accents of too evident irony. Ruth’s position must be perfectly
plain to the man, she thought; but it pleased the master to pretend
that he concealed it.

She made no reply; she merely stood a moment longer gazing about her
to get her bearings. She had no conscious plan except that she
recognized that she was to be taken into some sort of duress from
which she must attempt to escape; and if she succeeded she would
require memory of landmarks and directions. Von Forstner’s eyes
narrowed as he watched her and divined what was passing through her
mind; but he pretended that he did not.

“Have I not said it was beautiful here?” he asked.

“It is very beautiful,” Ruth replied and, as he motioned to her, she
preceded him into the car and sat upon the rear seat with him.

The car, which was fairly new and in good condition, drove off
rapidly. It evidenced to Ruth either that reports of the scarcity of
motor cars in Germany had been exaggerated or that Captain von
Forstner was a person of sufficient importance to possess a most
excellent vehicle from the vanishing supply. It followed a narrow
but excellent road through forest for half a mile; it ran out beside
cleared land, farm, and meadows, where a few cattle were grazing. A
dozen men were working in a field--big, slow-moving laborers.

Von Forstner observed that Ruth gazed at them. “Russians,” he
explained to her. “Some of my prisoners.”

He spoke as if he had taken them personally. “I have had, at various
times, also French and English and Canadians; and I expect some
Americans soon. I have asked for some; but they have not appeared
against us frequently enough yet for us to have a great many.”

“Still we have already not a few of you,” Ruth returned quietly. Her
situation scarcely could become worse, no matter what she now said;
and, as it turned out, von Forstner was amused at this defiance.

“If they are much like the Canadians they will not be much good
anyway,” he said.

“For fighting or farm work, you mean?”

Von Forstner hesitated just a trifle before he returned, “They can
stand nothing; they die too easily.”

The car was past the fields where the Russians toiled and was
skirting woodlands again; when fields opened once more quite
different figures appeared--figures of women and of a familiarity
which sent the blood choking in Ruth’s throat. They were French
women and girls, or perhaps Belgians of the sort whom she had seen
tilling free, French farms; but these were captives--slaves. And
seeing them, Ruth understood with a flaming leap of realization what
von Forstner had meant about the Russians. They were captives also,
and slaves; but they had never known freedom.

But to see these women slaves!

Von Forstner himself betrayed especial interest in them. He spoke
sharply to the driver, who halted the car and signaled for the
nearest of the slaves to approach.

“Where are you from?” he questioned them in French. They named
various places in the invaded lands; most of them had been but
recently deported and had arrived during von Forstner’s absence. Two
of the group, which numbered eight, were very young--girls of
sixteen or seventeen, Ruth thought. They gazed up at Ruth with wide,
agonized eyes and then gazed down upon the ground. Ruth glanced to
von Forstner and caught him estimating them--their faces, their
figures, as he had estimated her own. She caught him glancing from
them to herself now, comparing them; and her loathing, and
detestation of him and of all that he was, and which he represented
suddenly became dynamic.

He did not see that; but one of the French girls, who had glanced up
at her again, did see; and the girl looked quickly down at once as
though fearing to betray it. But Ruth saw her thin hands clenching
at her sides and crumpling the rags of her skirt; and from this Ruth
was first aware that her own hands had clenched and through her
pulled a new tension.

“Go on,” von Forstner ordered his driver.

The car sped along the turning road into woods; the road followed a
stream which rushed down a tiny valley thirty or forty feet below.
At times the turns gave glimpses far ahead and in one of these
glimpses Ruth saw a large house which must be the _Landgut_--or the
manor--of this German country-place.

“See! We are almost home, _Liebchen_!” Von Forstner pointed it out
to her when it was clearer and nearer at the next turn. He had his
hand upon Ruth again; and the confident lust of his fingers set hot
blood humming dizzily, madly in Ruth’s brain. The driver, as though
responding to the impatience of his master, sent the car spinning in
and out upon the turns of the road beside the brook. In two or three
minutes more--not longer--the car would reach the house. Now the car
was rushing out upon a reach of road abruptly above the stream and
with a turn ahead sharper, perhaps, than most. In spite of the speed
the driver easily could make the turn if unimpeded; but if
interfered with at all....

The plan barely was in Ruth’s brain before she acted upon it.
Accordingly, there was no chance for von Forstner to prevent it; nor
for the driver to oppose her. She sprang from her seat, seized the
driver’s right arm and shoulder, as he should have been turning the
steering-wheel sharply; and, for the necessary fraction of a second,
she kept the car straight ahead and off the road over the turn.

When a motor car is going over, crouch down; do not try to leap out.
So a racing driver, who had been driving military cars in France,
had drilled into Ruth when he was advising her how to run the roads
back of the battle lines. Thus as the car went over she sprang back
and knelt on the floor between the seats.

The driver fought for an instant, foolishly, to bring the car back
onto the road; then he flung himself forward and down in front of
his seat. Von Forstner, who had grabbed at Ruth too late, had been
held standing up when the car turned over. He tried to get down.
Ruth could feel him--she could not look up--as he tumbled half upon
her, half beside her. She heard him scream--a frightful, hoarse
man’s scream of mad rage as he saw he was caught. Then the car was
all the way over; it crushed, scraped, slid, swung, turned over; was
on its wheels for a flash; at least air and light were above again;
it pounded, smashed, and slid through brush, against small trees;
and was over once more. It ground and skewed in soft soil, horribly;
cold water splashed below it. It settled, sucking, and stopped.

The sound of water washing against metal; for a moment the hiss of
the water on the hot engine; then only the gurgle and rush of the
little brook.

Ruth lay upon her back in the stream with the floor of the car above
her; below her was von Forstner’s form, and about him were the
snapped ribs of the top with the fabric like a black shroud.

At first he was alive and his face was not under water; for he
shouted frantic oaths, threats, appeals for help. Wildly he cursed
Ruth; his back was broken, he said. He seemed to struggle at first,
not so much to free himself as to grasp and choke her. Then the back
of the car dammed the water and it rose above his face. He coughed
and thrashed to lift himself; he begged Ruth to help him; and,
turning as far about as she could, she tried to lift his head with
her hands, but she could not. The water covered him; and, after a
few moments, he was quite still.

The dam at the back of the car, which had caused the pool to rise
that high, failed to hold the water much higher; it ran out of the
sides of the car before it covered Ruth. It soaked her through; and
the weight of the machine held her quite helpless. But she had air
and could breathe.

From the forward seat came no sound and no movement. The driver
either had been flung out in one of the tumbles of the car or, like
his master, he had been killed under it. Ruth could only wonder
which.

But someone was coming down the embankment from the road now; more
than one person; several. Ruth could hear their movements through
the underbrush. Now they talked together--timidly, it seemed, and at
a little distance. Now they approached, still timidly and talking.

These were men’s voices, but strange in intonations and in language.
It was not German, or French, or any tongue with which Ruth was at
all familiar. It must be Russian. The timid men were Russians--some
of the slaves!

One of them touched the car and, kneeling, peered under it.




CHAPTER XVIII: THE MESSAGE IN CIPHER


Ruth could see dull eyes in a big, stupid face. The man said
something with the inflection of a question. She could not make out
the words, but obviously he was asking if anyone was alive under the
car. So Ruth answered. The face disappeared; and she heard
consultation. Soon several men tramped in the water and thrust
timbers under the side of the car and tilted it. Large, rough hands
reached under and caught Ruth and pulled her out.

She sank limp when the hands released her, gently enough, and laid
her upon the sloping bank above the stream. The man who had rescued
her had four companions, all of them Russians. They engaged
themselves immediately in dragging out Captain von Forstner and then
exploring under the car. But they found no one else. Ruth discovered
the driver lying a rod or so beyond her and farther up the slope.
Plainly he had been thrown out and the car had crushed him. The
Russians had seen him before they had come to the car, and when Ruth
made signs to them to go to the man they shook their heads,
repeating a sentence which meant--she had no doubt--that the man was
dead. They repeated the same words about von Forstner.

Ruth struggled up, dizzily, to find herself battered and with
muscles bruised and strained; but she had escaped without broken
bones or disabling injury. A German soldier, armed with a rifle,
joined the group of Russians about Ruth. Evidently he was a guard
who had been at some distance when the car went from the road.

“You are much injured, _gnädiges Fräulein_?” the soldier asked her
solicitously and respectfully.

“Only a little,” Ruth replied, collecting strength again and
regaining clearness of thought.

When the Russians first had come to her aid she had thought of them
as helping her, as an American against the Germans; but now she was
cool enough to realize how absurd that idea was. These peasant
slaves were not moved by any political emotions and, if they had
been, they were incapable of recognizing her as an American and the
possessor of any particular sympathy for them. She was to them a
lady--a companion of a master who undoubtedly had mistreated them;
but when they had found that master helpless they had been below any
instincts of revenge upon him. They had considered his misfortune a
lucky chance given them to perform some service which could win them
favor, and now that the master was dead they sought that favor from
the mistress.

And much the same considerations governed the German guard. It was
plain from his manner of address to her that he could not have
witnessed the accident to the car, or at least he could not have
observed that she had caused it. She was to him a friend of
Hauptmann von Forstner, who had passed riding beside Herr
Hauptmann--a lady, of the class of persons with whom Herr Hauptmann
associated and whose authority at all times and in all matters the
private soldier was accustomed to accept.

The authority which Ruth thus possessed was extremely local, of
course; its realms might not run beyond the little leafy valley of
the brook, and it surely was temporary; but locally and for the
instant it was hers.

“You desire, _gnädiges Fräulein_,” the soldier asked her, “that I
stay here and send one of them,” he indicated the Russians, “with
word to the manor or that I go?”

“You go,” Ruth directed, struggling up to her feet. “I am quite
strong again and you can do nothing for Herr Hauptmann.”

“No, _gnädiges Fräulein_, I can do nothing for Herr Hauptmann,” the
soldier agreed. Of himself he was doubtful whether he should yet
leave his _gnädiges Fräulein_, but he had been commanded, so he
went.

The Russians had withdrawn a little; and after the German soldier
was gone Ruth stood alone, gazing down at von Forstner’s body. She
had killed von Forstner and his servant. She had killed them in
self-defense and by an act which might have destroyed her as well as
them, yet horror shrank her as she saw them lying dead--horror which
first had seized her at the idea of individually dealing in death
that day long ago when she stood with Gerry in the parlor of the
_pension_ upon the Rue des Saints Pères, and when he had told her
that the French had taken Louis de Trevenac upon her information,
and were to execute him.

If she had killed these men solely to save herself, she must cast
herself down beside them. But she had not! That sudden, mad deed
which she had just performed--and in the consequences of which she
was just beginning to be involved--sprang not from self-defense. It
was not sense of escape from personal violation which at this moment
chiefly swayed her; it was a sensation of requital, in petty part,
for the savageries of that sweep through Belgium of which she had
heard four years ago; requital for the _Lusitania_; for Poland and
Serbia; for the bombing of Paris and for that long-range gun whose
shells she had seen bursting; for Grand’mère Bergues’ daughter and
for the other refugees upon the Mirevaux road; for the French girls
and women in slavery only a mile from here; for....

She raised her hands to her hair, which was wet, as she was wet all
over; she arranged her hair and her clothing as decently as she
could. A motor car was coming upon the road from the manor. It
stopped directly above, and the soldier and a man in civilian
clothes got out; the driver of the car remained in his seat and
maneuvered to turn the car about in the narrow road.

The man in civilian clothes, who came down the slope toward the
stream, was forty or forty-five years old, Ruth thought. He was a
large man, florid-faced and mustached, with the bearing not of
servant but of a subordinate--an overseer of some sort, Ruth
guessed, or perhaps a resident manager of the estate.

“Good morning, _gnädiges Fräulein_,” he saluted Ruth, breathless
from his haste and agitation. “I am Dittman,” he made himself known.
“What a terrible accident has occurred! Herr Hauptmann is dead, they
say; and Josef, too!” He gave barely a glance toward the body of the
chauffeur, but knelt at once beside von Forstner’s.

“They are both dead,” Ruth said quietly. It was plain that von
Forstner had been Dittman’s master and that Dittman, for the moment
at least, accepted Ruth as a friend of von Forstner’s, as the
soldier had.

“What shall I order done?” Dittman appealed to Ruth, rising.

“Take Hauptmann von Forstner’s body to the house, of course,” Ruth
directed. “Who is at the house?” she inquired.

“Besides the servants, this morning only Herr Adler.”

“Who is Herr Adler?”

“Why, he is Hauptmann von Forstner’s secretary.”

“Then why did he not himself come at once?”

“Word arrived that Herr Hauptmann was dead,” Dittman explained.
“Herr Adler did not think that you would require him here, _gnädiges
Fräulein_. Since Herr Hauptmann was dead it was more necessary than
ever for Herr Adler to remain at the house. Oberst-Lieutenant von
Fallenbosch communicates by telephone at this time in the morning;
immediately he must be informed.”

“Of course,” Ruth said.

She was aware that Dittman was observing her more and more
curiously, not so much because of her questions and of her ignorance
of the household affairs of Captain von Forstner, she thought, as
because of her accent. Dittman apparently was not surprised that the
lady companion of his master did not know about Adler; and even the
fact that she spoke German with an undisguisable foreign accent did
not stir suspicion, but only curiosity. Ruth apparently had taken
the right tone with this puffing underling by offering no
explanations whatever about herself and by demanding them of others.

“You are wet, _gnädiges Fräulein_,” he reminded her solicitously. “I
brought the motor car for you. If you will proceed I shall see to
all things for Herr Hauptmann.”

“Hauptmann von Forstner carried upon himself certain papers for
which I now must be responsible,” Ruth returned to Dittman.

“Ah, yes; of course, _gnädiges Fräulein_.”

“You may obtain them for me.”

Dittman knelt again, obediently, and carefully and methodically went
through von Forstner’s pockets. A few minutes before, when Ruth had
been alone but for the Russian slaves, she had realized that she
ought to obtain the papers in those pockets, but her revulsion at
making the search had halted her. Now that proved altogether
fortunate. Her fate here hung upon little things; and one of those
trifles which supported her, undoubtedly, was that she had waited
for this Dittman before allowing disturbance of any of von
Forstner’s effects.

Dittman gathered together everything from the pockets--money, keys,
penknife, cigarette case, revolver, and memorandum book, besides two
thick packets of folded papers; and he offered all to Ruth, who
accepted only the packets and the memorandum book. Dittman assisted
her to climb the slope to the waiting car.

“My bags, Dittman,” Ruth said to her escort when she was seated.
They had been held fairly well away from the water by the position
of the wrecked car; and there was more than a chance that the
leather had kept dry some of the clothing within. Ruth did not know
what lay before her but she could meet it better in fresh garments.
Dittman ordered one of the Russians to bring up her bags and place
them in the car.

As it sped away to the south Ruth sat back alone in the rear seat.
Evidently she had been expected at the manor house; from the border
or, perhaps, from Basel or from Lucerne Captain von Forstner had
warned his household that he was bringing her with him. Had he
described to his inferiors the relationship of his companion to him?
Almost surely he had not. If they had arrived together, in the
manner planned by von Forstner, his servants swiftly enough could
have arrived at their own conclusions; but now that von Forstner was
dead--accidentally, as all believed--matters lay so that his
servants might judge the nature of her association with their master
by the manner in which Ruth bore herself.

Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch, who communicated by telephone at
this time in the morning, suggested perilous complications, but
perils were all about her now, in any case. The bold course upon
which she was embarked was--if you thought about it--safer, in
reality, than any other.

So Ruth steadied herself as the car, clearing the woods, ran beside
open acres to a huge and old German manor house set baldly upon a
slope above the stream. A man was walking upon the terrace before
the door; he sighted the car and started quickly to meet it, but as
the car sped up he returned to the terrace and stood upon the lower
step at the edge of the drive. He was a short, broadly built but
nervous little man, upwards of thirty, spectacled, and with thick
hair cropped somewhat after the military fashion; but he was not in
uniform and his bearing was that of student or professional man,
rather than of the military.

When the car stopped he did not wait for the driver or one of the
servants, who now had come out upon the terrace, but he himself
opened the door and stood back quickly, staring at Ruth anxiously
and rubbing together his fat red hands.

“Herr Adler?” Ruth asked as she stood up.

“Yes, _gnädiges Fräulein_. You have come from the captain?”

Her drenched condition was witness to the fact, and Ruth observed
that, besides, his little eyes sought the packets of papers and the
memorandum book which she held.

“I have come from America and more recently from France,” Ruth said,
stepping down. They were alone now as Adler walked with her across
the terrace. “I have come from Lucerne with Captain von Forstner.”

“Yes, _gnädiges Fräulein_, I know; I know. And he is dead, they tell
me. It is true that he is dead?”

“He is dead,” Ruth confirmed. And she saw that the fact of von
Forstner’s death bore far different consequences to Adler than to
Dittman. The secretary was charged now with responsibilities which
had been his master’s; it was these, more than the physical accident
of von Forstner’s death, which overwhelmed and dismayed him. “But I
have recovered his reports and personal memoranda,” Ruth assured.

“Yes; yes. That is very fortunate.”

“Which I shall go over with you as quickly as I can change to dry
clothes, Herr Adler,” she continued. She did not know whether the
secretary had been about to make demand for his master’s papers; if
he had, she had anticipated him. “Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch
has telephoned?” Ruth asked.

“Ten minutes ago, _gnädiges Fräulein_.”

“Of course you told him that Captain von Forstner is dead.”

“Of course.”

“Well, what is he to do?”

“He is coming here at once.”

“That’s good,” Ruth managed, steadily enough. “Where was he when he
telephoned.”

“At Offenburg, _gnädiges Fräulein_.”

“Then he will arrive in about an hour?”

“At noon, he said. But first there is much,” Adler’s nervousness
increased, “much to be made ready for him.”

“I will not delay,” Ruth promised.

They had entered the hall--a large, dark hall with a wide, black
stairway rising at the side.

“I shall send your bags instantly to your room, _gnädiges
Fräulein_,” Adler assured. He halted, giving her over to a maid
servant for guidance. “Show Fräulein Brun to her apartment,” Adler
ordered. “I shall send stimulant,” he added.

So she was Fräulein Brun and she had been expected here! Captain von
Forstner had sent word that he was bringing her and had ordered her
apartment prepared; and his advices, even to Adler, had ended with
that.

Ruth followed the maid into a bedroom and boudoir, where, a moment
later, her bags were brought. Examination proved that they had
served to keep her packed clothing dry; and, with the maid’s
assistance, Ruth took off her soaked garments. The maid took down
her hair and brushed it out to dry; another maid appeared with the
stimulant which Adler had promised and also with hot broth and
biscuit. Ruth took this gladly and felt stronger. She let herself
relax, half dressed, in a chair while the maid fanned and brushed
her hair. From the window she saw a car coming to the manor with von
Forstner’s body; a few moments later she heard the feet of bearers
pass her room door. They appeared to take him into apartments just
beyond--those which had been his own, undoubtedly. Ruth instructed
the maid to do her hair and she would finish dressing.

Dismissing the maid, she remained alone in the room. She had kept
with her the papers which von Forstner had carried, and while she
had been under observation she had refrained from examining them.
Now she opened the packets and found that those papers which had
lain inside were almost dry; and swiftly spreading them before her
she saw that they appeared to be typewritten observations upon
economic matters of the character which a neutral Norwegian
gentleman might make. They must be, in fact--Ruth knew--cipher
memoranda of very different matters; they would probably not contain
any summaries, for von Forstner could carry all summaries in his
head. He would have committed to writing only details and
items--some of them petty, taken by themselves, but others of more
importance. They would have to do with conditions in France, but
while meant for German information their contents must carry quite
as important advices for the allies, for they would betray the
particular locations with which the Germans were concerning
themselves and thereby disclose the front of the next attack.

Ruth sorted the pages over swiftly and, finding that their texts
fell under nine heads, she removed the twenty-eight pages which were
under five of these heads; the other twenty-three pages she restored
to the two packets. She thrust the removed pages under her corset;
and, carrying the others in their wet packets, she left the room.
Descending the wide, black stairs, she found Adler pacing the
hallway as he had paced the terrace.

He led her into a large, high, dark paneled, mullion-windowed room
where old armor and battle maces stood upon the black walls above
modern office filing cases and with an ancient carved table topped
with glass and desk blotter; before this was an ordinary swivel
chair. Adler motioned Ruth to this as he put out his hand for the
packets.

“The reports now, please, _gnädiges Fräulein_!” Adler asked. “A
transcription immediately must be ready for Oberst-Lieutenant von
Fallenbosch! He will not find it like talking with Hauptmann von
Forstner; but we must do what we can!”

Ruth handed him the packets and she sat down in the swivel chair
while, on the other side of the glass table top, Adler spread out
the sheets. Their number appeared to satisfy him; at least he
questioned nothing, but, having the pages in order, he unlocked a
small, flat drawer and took out three paper stencils. The apertures
through the paper differed, Ruth saw, with each stencil. Adler laid
them in order over the first three sheets, and, bending, read to
himself the words which remained in sight under the stencils. Ruth
could not see what he read nor the brief transcript he made with
pencil upon a pad. He shifted the stencils to the next three sheets,
read the result again, made his transcript, and again shifted.

Adler came to the end and gazed up at Ruth. The other women whom
Hauptmann von Forstner had invited to Lauengratz and who had used
those apartments above evidently had been of unquestionable loyalty,
for the secretary, when he gazed up at this guest of his dead
master, did not challenge her. He sought information to prepare
himself for the visit of Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch, not half
an hour away.

“Besides these, _gnädiges Fräulein_,” he appealed anxiously, “did
Herr Hauptmann make no verbal mention of other matters?”

Ruth shook her head. “Personal matters between him and myself,” she
said. “But he did not go into the reports of others with me at all.
In fact, he would not even receive my report; since I was coming
into Germany I could make it myself to Oberst-Lieutenant
Fallenbosch. That would be safer, he said.”

This true recital threw Adler into gesturing despair. “Exactly; it
is precisely what he would do! It is safest; it is most discreet to
put nothing, or as little as possible, upon paper. That is always
his obsession! So discreet! When I say to him it is not always safer
he laughs or tells me to mind my own business! Discretion! It is
because he is so obsessed by it that he directs our secret service
for the district. ‘Have merely an ordered mind, a good memory,
Adler,’ he always says to me, ‘and nothing will be misplaced,
nothing will get astray, nothing will be obtained by others.’

“‘Yes, Herr Hauptmann,’ I say, ‘but suppose something happen to that
ordered mind and that good memory! What then?’ Ah! He laughs at me
and pats me on the back so indulgently. But where is that ordered
mind; where now is that memory to which the most important things
may be committed? Well, he is away from the trouble,” the secretary
raged in his dismay. “He can hear nothing which Oberst-Lieutenant
von Fallenbosch may say of him. But I--I will get it.... Yet you can
make your report to him. At least, that much may be added. You have
come from where, Fräulein Brun? Which front?” he beseeched
hopefully.

“From Picardy,” Ruth said. “I had the honor to be assigned to Roisel
and to attach myself, particularly, to the British Fifth Army.”

“Ah! I salute you, _gnädiges Fräulein_, and your comrades for the
wonderful work you have done. But the importance of that is past,
Fräulein Brun! Since then where have you been?”

“My duty, as I interpreted it, was to retreat with the British; so I
was swept back with them to Compiègne. Since then, as I explained to
Herr Hauptmann, passport difficulties detained me in Paris.”

“Then all from Reims to Soissons is in Herr Hauptmann’s ordered
mind! It is, as all the most essential would be, in his ‘good
memory’! And, by the latest, today the report was to start to great
headquarters!”

The secretary jerked about from Ruth and hurried back and forth
across the room, head down and clapping his hands loudly together in
his despair; and Ruth, watching him, sat stark. The importance of
the Picardy front was past, he had said--that front where, in the
tremendous assaults of March, the Germans had thrust their great
salient between Amiens and Paris and where all the allies were
working, day and night, strengthening their lines against a new
attack! The Flanders front, where still the German armies were
hurling themselves toward the channel? Adler did not even mention
that. The “most essential” was the front from Reims to Soissons, all
quiet now and one which--so far as Ruth knew--the allies expected to
remain quiet and where they yet were unprepared for a great attack.

But there the next tremendous assault must be coming; and it was so
near that, by the latest, today report of conditions upon that front
was to start to great headquarters! Well, whatever was written about
that front Ruth had now in the papers folded tight against her body
and what von Forstner had entrusted to his ordered mind was lost
forever! Keenly she watched Adler while, still striking his hands
together in his helplessness, he strode swiftly up and down.

He spun about to her suddenly, and for an instant Ruth believed he
was about to challenge her. But the secretary could not yet reach
suspicion of the comrade of his Herr Hauptmann and for whom
Hauptmann von Forstner had instructed rooms to be made ready beside
his own and who herself had completed the journey to Lauengratz
alone and of her own will and bearing Herr Hauptmann’s papers.

“You removed these yourself from Herr Hauptmann’s body?”

“No; Dittman procured them for me. I was somewhat injured myself,
you see,” she explained her neglect. “And a little faint, at first.”

“Of course; of course! But Dittman is a thick skull! He might not
have suspected where Herr Hauptmann might have concealed the most
important memoranda!” Adler livened with hope. “And there were
Russians, I understand, who first found you and dragged out Herr
Hauptmann. They are mere brutes, incapable of understanding
anything. Nevertheless they may have meddled. I shall send and see
and at once myself examine the body of Herr Hauptmann!”

He turned about and gazed at his papers; he swept them together and
into a drawer. The stencils, by which he had read the ciphers, went
with them. “You will remain here, _gnädiges Fräulein_,” he half
commanded, half requested, and he hastened from the room.

Ruth delayed only the instant necessary to make certain that he had
gone upstairs. Suspicion which now turned upon Dittman and upon the
Russians swiftly must approach her; moreover, the hour of arrival of
Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch was almost here. By her stroke of
boldness and of luck she had succeeded in temporarily overreaching
the secretary whom she had found so unbalanced by the death of his
superior. But she could not possibly hope to dupe von Fallenbosch.
She must fail with him as miserably as she had failed with von
Forstner. And to attempt with him and to fail involved, now, not
only her own destruction but delivery into German hands of that most
essential information which she had intercepted, and loss to the
allies of the knowledge of German plans.

She opened the drawer which Adler had just closed and she took out
the sheets of von Forstner’s reports and the stencils. She went out
into the hall and, finding it empty, she passed quickly to a door on
the side of the house which, she believed, was not commanded from
the windows of the room where Captain von Forstner’s body lay. In
that direction, also, the forest lay nearer to the house; Ruth went
out and walked toward the trees. An impulse to run almost controlled
her, but she realized that she must be in sight of servants, who
might not question her strolling out away from the house in the warm
spring sunshine but who would immediately report anything which
resembled flight. So she went slowly until she reached the forest;
then she ran--wildly and breathlessly.

She found a path, well marked and much used and easy to run upon.
Other paths, almost overgrown, opened into it here and there. Ruth
ran by the first few of these; then, choosing arbitrarily, she took
one of the disused ways which twisted north--she noticed--through
denser thickets of budding oaks and beeches; it ascended, too,
bending back and forth up a mountainside which brought the darker
boughs of the black firs drooping about her while, underfoot, the
ground alternately became stony bare and soft with velvety cushions
of pine needles.

She stopped at last, exhausted and gasping; her pulses were pounding
so in her head that she scarcely could hear, and the forest on every
side limited sight. But so far as she could see and as well as she
could hear there was no alarm of anyone following her. It seemed
absolutely still on the mountainside except for the movement of the
noon breeze in the tree tops; now from somewhere far away and off to
the right she heard the ring of an ax and, after a minute, the fall
of a tree; now the sound of the ax again.




CHAPTER XIX: THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY


Ruth sank down upon the ground in a warm, sunny spot where the trees
were more scant than they had been below. They were dense enough,
however, to shield her from sight of anyone in the valley, while
they permitted a view down the mountainside. Off to the west she
could see a stretch of railroad; nearer she got a glimpse of a
highway; she saw horsemen and several slower specks, which must be
men on foot. Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch had arrived, Ruth
believed, and Adler had started the pursuit after her. But as she
thought of the maze of pathways through the forest she believed that
she was safe for a while--unless a large number of the prisoners
joined in the search and if Adler did not use dogs to track her.

But she could not make herself safer by farther aimless flight. Here
seemed to be as secure a spot as she might find for the examination
of the documents which she had procured; here was the place to plan.
She laid out upon a rock the pages of von Forstner’s report, and,
placing the stencils, she studied them in series of three, as she
had seen Adler do. These pages--those which Adler had read, together
with those which she had kept concealed--told a plain, certain
story. The Germans at the present moment were concerning themselves
with the minutest details of events before the Reims-Soissons line
of the allies; other sectors, in comparison, were disregarded;
before Reims and Soissons the enemy were maturing their great
attack!

Ruth, having read, gathered together the pages and sat in the sun
gazing away over the Rhine to the west. The feeling of fate--the
touch of destiny--which had exalted and transformed her upon that
cold January morning in Chicago quickened her again. Something
beyond herself originally had sent her into this tremendous
adventure, throughout which she had followed
instinct--chance--fate--whatever you called it--rather than any
conscious scheme. At the outset she had responded simply to impulse
to serve; to get into Germany--how, she did not know; to do
there--what, she had not known. At different times she had formed
plans, of course, many plans; but as she thought back upon them now
they seemed to her to have contemplated only details, as though she
had recognized her incapacity, by conscious plan, to attain this
consummation.

For she realized that this was consummation. This which she already
had gained, and gained through acts and chances which she could not
have foreseen, was all--indeed, more than all--she could have hoped
to obtain through the vague, delayed ordeals which her fancy had
formed for her. She had nothing more to attempt here in the enemy’s
land than escape and return to the allied lines; she had no right,
indeed, to attempt more; for anything additional which she could
gain would be of such slight value, in comparison with what she now
had, that it could not justify her in heaping hazard upon the risks
which she must run in returning to the allied armies with the
knowledge she possessed.

There was Gerry Hull, of course. He was in this land of the enemy
somewhere--alive or dead. When she was entering Germany she had
thought of herself as coming, somehow, to find and to aid him. But
what she had gained meant that now she must abandon him.

She gazed toward the railroad and to the white streak of the road to
Lauengratz, upon which, after a few minutes, a motor again passed;
more horsemen appeared and more specks of walking men. But through
the woods was silence; the axmen, whom she had heard before, began
to fell other trees; and the steadiness of the sound brought Ruth
reassurance. Whatever search was being made below had not yet
disturbed the woodsmen near her. Yet she arose and crept a few
hundred yards farther up the mountainside, and under heavier cover,
before she dropped to the ground again.

She found herself more relaxed as the rowels of peril, which had
goaded her mercilessly, ceased to incite fresh strength for farther
flight. All her nerves and senses remained alert; but her body was
exhausted and sore. She was hungry, too; and though nothing was
farther from her thought than sleep, nevertheless she suffered the
result not only of the strains of the morning, but also of her
sleeplessness during the night. She was cold, having changed from
her suit to a linen street dress which had been Cynthia Gail’s, and
she was without a hat; so she sought the sun once more and sat back
to a tree and rested.

If recaptured--she thought of herself as having been captured by von
Forstner--she recognized that she would be shot. Therefore her
recapture with von Forstner’s reports upon her could not make her
fate worse; and in any case she determined to preserve them as proof
to the French--if she ever regained access to the French--that the
information which she bore was authentic. She did up the papers and
the stencils together and secreted them under her clothing.

She tried to imagine what Adler and Oberst-Lieutenant von
Fallenbosch--who undoubtedly was now saying to Adler a good deal
more than the secretary had dreaded--would expect her to do so that
she could choose the opposite course. The alternatives, obviously,
were effort to reach the Swiss frontier and in some way elude the
border guards or to make for the Alsace front, where the French and
the Americans were fighting.

This second allured her powerfully; but, to attempt it, meant
leaving this friendly cover of the Black Forest--which would hide
her almost to the Swiss frontier--and crossing west to the Rhine and
across to the Rhine Canal, and almost the whole way across Alsace to
the Vosges Mountains, where the opposing trenches twisted. She knew
that behind the German fighting front she would encounter a military
zone of many miles, much more difficult to penetrate than the
civilian zone bounding the soldier-sentineled barriers at the Swiss
frontier. But, just beyond that zone in Alsace lay American
battalions; above it would be flying American battleplanes.

Ruth closed her eyes and seemed to see them; one was fighting as she
had seen Gerry Hull fight that morning near Mirevaux. It was he and
he was being shot down!

She started up, blinking in the sunlight. He had been shot down
again, in truth. This was Germany; and he was in Germany; the enemy
had him--von Forstner’s boasting voice was saying it--dead or a
prisoner. She shuddered and closed her eyes to see, again, Gerry
Hull’s face. She seemed to be looking up at him; he was in
blue-gray--his French uniform. Palms and roses were behind him. They
were in Mrs. Corliss’ conservatory together, their first time alone.

“You’re not like anyone else here,” he was saying to her. “That’s
why I needed to see you again.... What is it, Cynthia Gail?” A
queer, warm little thrill went through her; she seemed to be still
looking up at him, his arms were about her now; he was carrying her.
They were upon the _Ribot_ and she was telling him that she would
have gone into the sea to get anyone--anyone at all. Now,
“Ruth--Ruth Alden!” he was saying. Her own name; and he liked to
repeat it. “They shan’t!” he was holding her so fiercely. “They
shan’t!” Now he kissed her hand. Her fingers of her other hand
closed gently over the hand he had kissed; so, in the sunlight at
the base of a tree high upon the mountainside above Lauengratz in
the Black Forest of Baden, at last she fell asleep.

Not soundly nor for extended periods; a score of times she stirred
and started up at sounds made by the breeze or at the passage of
some small forest animal. Once a human footfall aroused her; and she
was amazed to learn how delicate her hearing had been made by alarm
when she discovered how distant the man was. He bore an ax; and
evidently he was a Russian or perhaps a French captive; he passed
upon a path far below without even looking up to where she hid in
the trees. Nevertheless Ruth fled farther about the mountain before
she dared rest again.

At nightfall she was awake and during the first hours of blackness
she forced her way on in spite of the dismaying difficulties of wood
travel in the dark. She fell repeatedly, even when she ventured upon
a path, or she bruised herself upon boughs and stumbled into
thickets. But she did not give up until the conviction came to her
that she was hopelessly lost.

At best, she had been proceeding but blunderingly, attempting no
particular course; merely endeavoring to keep to a definite
direction. But now she did not know whether she had worked west of
Lauengratz or had circled it to the east or south. She was cold,
too; and hungry and quite exhausted. Twice she had crossed tiny
brooks--or else the same brook twice--and she had cupped her hands
to drink; thus, with nothing more than the cold mountain water to
restore her, she lay down at last in a little hollow and slept.

The morning light gave her view over strange valleys with all the
hills and mountain tops in new configuration. She stood up, stiff,
and bruised, and weak; taking her direction from the sun, she
started west, encountering cleared ground soon and a well-traveled
road, which she dared not cross in the daylight. So she followed it
north until a meeting road, with its cleared ground, halted her. At
first she determined to wait until dark; but after a few hours of
frightened waiting she risked the crossing in daylight and fled into
the farther woods unseen. Again that afternoon she came into the
open to cross a north and south road. Early in the evening she
crossed a railroad, which she believed to be the road from Freiburg
to Karlsruhe.

She had seen many men, women, and children that day, as upon the
previous day, passing on the roads, or busy about houses, or working
in fields, or in the woodlands. Most of the people were Germans; but
many, undoubtedly, were military prisoners or deported civilians.
She had avoided all alike, not daring to approach any house or any
person, though now she had been forty-eight hours without food
except for the “stimulant” and the accompanying biscuit which Adler
had sent her.

That night, however, she found the shelter of a shed where was straw
and at least a little more warmth than under the trees. Refuge there
involved more risk, she knew; but she had reached almost the end of
her strength; and, lying in the straw and covering herself with it,
she slept dreamlessly at first, and then to reassuring, pleasant
dreams. She was in a château--one of those white-gray, beautiful,
undamaged buildings which she had seen far behind the battle lines
in France; she was lying in a beautiful, soft bed, much like that
which had been hers at Mrs. Mayhew’s apartment upon the Avenue
Kléber. Then all shifted to a great hospital ward, like that in
which she had visited Charles Gail; but she was in the same
beautiful bed and an attendant--a man--had come to take her pulse.

She stirred, it had become so real; she could feel gentle, but firm,
and very real fingers upon her wrist. Now a man’s voice spoke, in
French and soothingly. “It is well, Mademoiselle, I do not mean harm
to you. I am only Antoine Fayal, a Frenchman from Amagne in the
department of Ardennes, Mademoiselle. I----”

Opening her eyes, Ruth saw a thin, hollow-cheeked, dark-haired man
of middle age in the rags of blouse and trousers which had been,
once, a French peasant’s attire. He quickly withdrew his hand, which
had been upon Ruth’s wrist; and his bloodless lips smiled
respectfully and reassuringly.

“I am French, Mademoiselle,” he begged in a whisper. “Believe me!
One of the deported; a prisoner. My duty here, a woodsman! Happening
by here, Mademoiselle, I discovered you; but I alone! No one else.
You will pardon; but you were so white; you barely breathed. I did
not believe you dead, Mademoiselle; but faint, perhaps. So I sought
to ascertain!”

“I thank you!” Ruth whispered back, feeling for her papers. “Where
are we?”

“This is part of the estate of Graf von Weddingen, Mademoiselle. We
are very close to the Rhine. You are----” he coughed and altered his
question before completing it. “It may be in my power to aid you,
Mademoiselle?”

“I am an American,” Ruth said.

“Yes, Mademoiselle.”

“I have been trying to reach Alsace and the French and American
lines.”

“You have done well so far, Mademoiselle,” Fayal said respectfully.

“How do you know?”

“I know that at noon yesterday, Mademoiselle, you were twenty
kilometers away. The whole countryside has been warned to find you;
but you have come these twenty kilometers in spite of them.”

He coughed and checked himself, a little guiltily, as she startled.
“That is, Mademoiselle, if you are that American lady who had
accompanied Hauptmann von Forstner.”

“I am that one,” Ruth admitted.

“Then, Mademoiselle, come immediately with me! No moment is to be
lost!”

He went to the door of the shed and gazed cautiously about. Ruth
arose and began brushing the straw from herself; sleep had restored
her nerves, but not her strength, she found. She swayed when she
stepped. She was completely at the mercy of this man, as she must
have been in the power of whoever found her. But she did not
distrust Fayal. His emaciation, his cough, and, more than those, his
manner--the manner of a man who had been suffering indignities
without letting himself become servile; and together with that, his
concern and respect for a woman--seemed to Ruth beyond counterfeit.

“You require food, of course, Mademoiselle!” Fayal exclaimed in
dismay. “And I have none!”

“I can follow you,” Ruth assured.

“Then now, Mademoiselle!”

He stepped from the shed, and, motioning to her to imitate him, he
slipped into the trees to the right. Evidently he considered her
danger great; the peril to him, if caught aiding one who was
attempting escape, must be as positive as her own; but the Frenchman
was disregardful of that. He gained a gully, and, returning, aided
her in descending. Someone approached. “Lie flat!” Fayal whispered.
She obeyed; and, while she lay, she heard German voices shouting and
the sounds of search.

When they had moved far away, Fayal led her to a dugout entrance,
concealed by brush and with last year’s leaves scattered before it.

“Keep well back in there, Mademoiselle; until I come again for you!”

She went into a low and dark but fairly dry cavern under the
hillside. She heard Fayal tossing about leaves to hide the entrance
as before. Soon he was gone.

Many times during the day Ruth heard people passing through the
woods. Once she was sure that a group of men were engaged in a
search; but they failed to find the cavern. Only late in the
afternoon someone, who stepped quickly and lightly--a child or a
slight, active woman--ran close past the brush before the entrance,
and, without halting, tossed a bundle into the bush.

Ruth had been obeying Fayal’s injunction to stay well back in the
cavern; now, venturing to the bush, she found a paper package,
within which was a chunk of blackish, hard bread and two boiled
turnips. She thought, as she saw this food, that it had been Fayal’s
perhaps; at least, it had been the ration of some prisoner or
deported captive as ill fed, probably, as he. But she was ravenous;
this had been given her, however little it could have been spared by
the donor. She ate it all and was stronger.

Fayal did not return that day; but during the night someone visited
the cavern, for, when morning came, she found food.

At night Fayal returned, and when he guided her out of the woods
across fields and farms, she realized how essential were the
precautions he had enjoined. He guided her half the night, and
brought her to another concealment, where another French refugee
took her in charge.

She had become a passenger, she found, upon one of the “underground
railways” in operation to conduct escaped prisoners across the
frontiers; Fayal, having brought her safely over his section, said
his adieu.

“The next German attack is to come upon the French on the front
between Reims and Soissons, remember, Fayal,” Ruth enjoined upon the
man when parting with him. “If I fail to get through, you must try
to send the word.”

“Yes, Mademoiselle. But you must not fail. Good fortune,
Mademoiselle, adieu!”

“Good fortune, Fayal; a thousand thanks again; and--adieu!”

Her new conductor led her on a few more miles that night; she laid
up during the day; at night proceeded under a new guide.

So she passed on from hiding place to hiding place, sometimes lying
for days at a time--terrible, torturing delays, during which she
dreamed of the Germans advancing over all that Reims-Soissons front
and sweeping over the French armies as they had overwhelmed the
British in Picardy. And she--she, if she might go on, could prevent
them! Many times during the endless hours she lay alone waiting for
her guide who did not appear, she crept out from her concealment,
determined to force on; but always she learned the futility of
attempting to proceed alone.

She was following her sixth guide after Fayal, and it was upon the
eleventh evening after her escape from Lauengratz, when suddenly she
heard a rough challenge; German soldiers appeared across the path;
others leaped up from the right and left; yet others were behind.

Her guide instantly recognized that he had led her into a trap; and
he fought, wildly, to try to save her. She fought, too. But they
bayoneted him, and, upon their bayonets, they bore him back upon
her. A soldier seized her; overpowered her, brutally, and she
struggled no longer with hope to fight free, but only to destroy the
papers which she still carried. So they pinioned her arms; they half
stripped her in searching her; they took her papers, and leaving her
guide dead upon the ground, they hurried her with them to their
commandant.

This officer instantly suspected her identity. For, in spite of her
eleven nights of flight, she was not yet seventy miles from
Lauengratz. Disposition of her evidently had been predetermined,
pending her recapture; for the officer, after examining her again,
dispatched her to a railroad train, under guard. They put her in
manacles and, boarding a north-bound train, they took her to a town
the name of which she could not learn. From the station they marched
her to what appeared to be an old castle, where they at once
confined her, alone, in a stone-walled cell.

It possessed a solitary, narrow slit of a window, high up under the
ceiling; it boasted for furniture a cot, a chair and bowls. The
Germans relieved her of the manacles when they led her into this
cell. Not long after she was left alone, light streaked in through
the slit of a window; a hand, opening a panel in her door, thrust in
a dipper of soup and a chunk of bread.

Ruth received the food, consumed it, and sank down upon her pallet.
Her great venture thus had come to an end; her life was forfeit; and
by all that she had dared and done, she had accomplished--nothing.

No; more than nothing. She had caused the arrest of De Trevenac and
those taken with him; she had aided at least a little in the
frightful labors of the retreat from Mirevaux. She had saved the
life of Gerry Hull!

She never before had permitted herself to think that she had saved
Gerry; without her he might have been able to free himself from
under his machine. But now she let herself believe.

This gave her a share in the battles which he had fought over the
advancing enemy lines. Yes; she had accomplished more than nothing.
Yet how much less than she had dreamed! And all of her dream--or
most of it--might actually have come true! She had possessed the
German plan; indeed, she still possessed the knowledge of the front
of the next assault and something of the detail of the enemy
operations! She had committed it, verbally, to Fayal and to others
of her guides; so it was possible that it might yet reach the allied
lines. But she realized that, even though Fayal or one of the others
sent the word through, it must completely lack authority; it must
reach the French as merely a rumor--a trick of the enemy, perhaps;
it could not be heeded.

She sat up with muscles all through her tugging taut. It seemed that
with her frantic strength, with her bare hands she must rend those
stones and escape, not to save herself, but to return to the allied
lines and tell them what she knew. But the coldness of the stones,
when she touched them, shocked her to realizations.

Tomorrow--or perhaps even today--the enemy might take her out and
kill her. And while death--her individual, personal
annihilation--had become a matter of amazingly small account, yet
the recognition that with death must come withdrawal, perhaps, even
from knowledge of how the battle was going upon that line where the
fate of all the world was at stake, where Britons and French fought
as she had seen them fight, and where, at last, America was
arriving--that crushed her down to her pallet and with despair quite
overwhelmed her.

So she set herself to thinking of Gerry. He was alive, perhaps; a
prisoner, therefore, and to be returned some day when the war was
over, to marry Lady Agnes, while she.... Ruth did not shudder when
she thought of herself dead.

Perhaps Gerry was dead; then she would be going at once to join him.
And if they merely took her out and shot her today, or tomorrow, or
some day soon, without doing anything more to her than that, she
might find Gerry and rejoin him, much as she had been when he had
known her and--yes--liked her. Without having suffered indignity,
that was. These cold stones seemed at least to assure her of this.
So she lay and thought of him while the slit of light crept slowly
from left to right as the sun swung to the west and she listened for
the step of those who would come to her cell.




CHAPTER XX: AN OFFICERS’ PRISON


Gerry, when shot down over the German lines, had succeeded in making
that “some sort of landing” which his comrades had reported.

There was an axiom, taught in the training camps to give confidence
to cadets, which said that when a pilot once gets his wheels
squarely on the ground, he will not be killed, though his machine
may be badly smashed. Gerry, in his landing, had tested this axiom
to its utmost; for he had had sufficient control of his ship, at the
last, to put his wheels square to the ground; and though his machine
was wholly wrecked, he was not killed. He was painfully shaken and
battered; but so excellently was his ship planned to protect the
pilot in a “crash,” that he was not even seriously injured. Indeed,
after the German soldiers dragged him out he was able to stand--and
was quite able, so the German intelligence officers decided, to
undergo an ordeal intended to make him divulge information.

This ordeal failed, as it failed with all brave men taken prisoners;
and Gerry was given escort out of the zone of the armies and put
upon a train for a German prison camp. With him were an American
infantry lieutenant and two French officers.

The Germans held, at that time, nearly two million prisoners of war,
of which upwards of twenty thousand were officers; the men and
non-commissioned officers--as Gerry had heard--were distributed in
more than a hundred great camps, while for the officers there were
about fifty prisons scattered all over the German states. These
varied in character from sanatoria, newly erected high-school
buildings, hotels, and vacated factories, to ancient brick and stone
fortresses housing prisoners in their dark, damp casemates. The
_offizier-gefangenenlager_ to which Gerry and his three companions
finally were taken proved to be one of the old fortress castles just
east of the Rhine, in the grand duchy of Hesse; its name was
Villinstein, and it housed at that time about five hundred officers
and officers’ servants. There Gerry and his three companions were
welcomed, not alone for themselves, but for the news which they
brought with them; and Gerry, being an aviator, found himself
particularly welcome.

“For a flyin’ man we’ve been a-waitin’, Gerry, dear,” Captain
O’Malley--formerly of the Irish Fusiliers--whispered and all but
chanted into Gerry’s ear soon after they became acquainted. All
allied officer prisoners--as German official reports frequently
complained--planned an escape; but some schemed more than others.
And the heart, if not the soul, of the schemes of escape from
Villinstein was the black-haired, dark-eyed, light-hearted Kerry man
of twenty-four summers, who was back in the casemates with his
fellows again after six weeks of “the solitary” in a dungeon as
punishment for his last effort for liberty.

“’Tis this way,” O’Malley initiated Gerry immediately into the order
of those bound to break for freedom. They were standing alone at a
corner of the castle, which gave view over the ground to the east.
“Out there you see the first wire--’tis often charged with
electricity at night--to catch us if we leap over these walls.
Beyond you see the second entanglement of the same persuasion; after
that--nothing at all! Do you see?”

Gerry admitted vision, as though the walls below them, the guards
and the two wire barriers were merest trifles.

“We’ve been beyond many times,” the Irishman motioned, unfolding his
theory of immateriality of the apparent obstacles. “Many times.”

“How?” Gerry inquired.

“By burrow, mostly. Now and then in other ways; but by tunnel is
most certain. ’Tis harmless amusement for us, the enemy think; so
they let us dig, though they know we’re doing it, till we’re ready
to run out. Then they halt us and claim the reward. ’Tis arranged
so.”

Gerry nodded. He had heard long before, from escaped prisoners, that
at certain camps the Germans made little attempt to prevent
tunneling until the burrows were almost completed. The German system
of rewards, by some peculiar psychology of the command, gave more
credit to guards for “detecting” an escape than at first preventing
it.

“This time ’twill be different!” O’Malley promised, smacking his
lips.

“Why?”

“They don’t know where we’re burrowing.”

“How many times before haven’t they known?” Gerry asked cautiously.

“Many times,” O’Malley admitted. “But this time they don’t. We’re
working at two they know about, of course; but the third--” he
checked himself and looked about cautiously, then spoke more closely
to Gerry’s ear. “’Tis well planned now. Ye’ve seen the tennis court
in the courtyard?”

“Certainly,” Gerry said.

“Did ye note the fine new grandstand we built about it?”

He referred, obviously, to the tiers of steps, or seats, to
accommodate the spectators at the match games for the championship
of the camp which then were being played.

“Under the stands where they run up against the side of the canteen
building,” O’Malley confided, “is a fine, empty space for hiding
dirt which the Huns don’t yet inspect--that not yet being listed for
inspection, nothing yet having happened beneath. So there we’re
digging the true tunnel--besides the two that everyone knows about.
Now that you’re here, we’ll use it. We’ve been only awaiting--while
wishing nobody any hard luck--for a flying man. For we’ve been
beyond the wire many times,” the Irishman repeated. “But now with
you here, we’ll go farther.” And he gazed away to the east, where
airplanes were circling in the clear sky.

They had risen from an airdrome about two miles distant from
Villinstein, Gerry learned, where the Germans were training cadet
flyers. O’Malley had managed to learn something of the arrangement
of the airdrome and had observed the habits of the cadets; he had a
wonderful plan by which the party of prisoners, who should use the
secret tunnel to get beyond the wire, should surprise the guards at
the flying field and capture an airplane. Thus Gerry began his
prison life with a plot for escape.

At times he took his turn digging in the tunnel; at times he was one
of the crowd of spectators upon the stand about the tennis court,
who stamped and applauded loudly whenever the men working below
signaled for a little noise to mask their more audible activities;
at times he himself took part in the play.

Every few days groups of prisoners were permitted to take a tramp in
the neighborhood under the escort of a couple of German officers. To
obtain this privilege, each prisoner was required to give his parole
not to attempt to escape while on these expeditions; but as the
parole bound no one after the return to the fortress, the prisoners
gave it. Gerry in this way obtained a good view of the surroundings
of Villinstein; and in one way or another he and the other officers
picked up a good deal of news which otherwise would not have reached
the prison.

It was in this manner that word reached the officer prisoners at
Villinstein that an American girl, who had entered Germany by way of
Switzerland in an attempt to obtain military information, had been
captured and had been taken to the _schloss_ belonging to von
Fallenbosch, near Mannheim, fifty miles away. It was not known
whether she had been executed or whether she still was living;
indeed, it was not known whether she had been tried yet; or whether
she was to be tried; and her identity--except that she was an
American girl--also was a mystery. That is, it was unknown to the
prisoner who brought in the news and to the others to whom he told
it; but it was not a mystery to Gerry. He knew that the girl was
Ruth Alden--that she had gone on with her plan and been caught.

And the knowledge imbued him with furious dismay. He blamed himself
as the cause of her being at the mercy of the enemy. He had seen no
way past the dilemma which had confronted him in regard to her,
except to make a negative report in regard to Ruth which--he had
hoped--would both keep her free from trouble with the French
authorities and prevent her gaining permission to leave France for
Switzerland. He had learned, too late, that while he had
accomplished the former end, he had failed in the latter. She had
been allowed to proceed to Switzerland; then he was shot down and
captured.

It had been impossible, therefore, for him to seek further
information of her fate; but he had her in his mind almost
constantly. When he was by himself, in such isolation as Villinstein
afforded, his thoughts dwelt upon her. He liked to review, half
dreamily as he sat in a corner of a casemate with a book, all his
hours with her and recall--or imagine--how she looked that first
time she had spoken to him. The days upon the _Ribot_ had become,
marvelously, days with her. Quite without his will--and certainly
without his conscious intention--Agnes had less and less place in
his recollections of the voyage. She was always there, of course;
but his thought and his feelings did not of themselves restore to
him hours with her. It was the same when he was talking over
personal and home affairs with the men with whom he became best
acquainted--with O’Malley and a Canadian captain named Lownes; when
the Irishman spoke of the girl waiting for him and when Lownes--who
was married--told of his wife, Gerry mentioned Ruth; and--yes--he
boasted a bit of her.

“I thought,” O’Malley said to him later, “that you were engaged to
an English girl, the daughter of an earl or such.”

Gerry colored a little. “We’ve been good friends; that’s all,
Michael; never more than that. When we happened to go to America on
the same boat, our papers over there tried to make more of it; and
some of their stuff reached this side.”

This was true enough; but it left out of account the fact that, not
long ago, Gerry had hoped himself some day to make “more of it”;
and, later, he had not tried. Now, as he thought back he knew that
Agnes had never loved him; and he had not loved her. This strange
girl whom he had known at first as Cynthia, and then as Ruth Alden,
had stirred in him not only doubts of the ideas by which he had
lived; she had roused him to requirements of friendship--of love,
let him admit it now--which he had not felt before. Their ride
together away from Mirevaux, when he sat almost helpless and swaying
at her side after she had saved his life, became to him the day of
discovery of her and of himself. He could see her so clearly as her
eyes blurred with tears when she told him about “1583;” and he knew
that then he loved her. Their supper together at Compiègne became to
him the happiest hour of his life. He had felt for her more strongly
that evening of their last parting in the _pension_; but then the
shadow of her great venture was over them.

Everything which happened somehow reminded him of her. When he was
out of the prison during the walks on parole and he passed groups of
German civilians and overheard their remarks about America, he
thought of her. The Germans were perfectly able to understand why
France fought, and why England fought, and why Russia had fought;
but why had America come in? Why was America making her tremendous
effort? What was she to gain? Nothing--nothing material, that was.
The enemy simply could not understand it except by imputing to
America motives and aims which Gerry knew were not true. Thus from
experience with the enemy he was beginning to appreciate that
feeling which Ruth had possessed and tried to explain to
him--feeling of the true nobility of his country. So, as he went on
his walks in Germany, he was proud that his uniform marked him as an
American. Prouder--yes, prouder than he could have been under any
other coat!

He had intended to tell her so; but now she was taken and in the
hands of the Germans! They would execute her; perhaps already they
had! From such terrors there was no relief but work--work in the
tunnel, by which he must escape, and then save her, or die trying.

A little more news arrived; the American girl was believed to be yet
alive; that was four days ago.

“We must work faster,” O’Malley enjoined after hearing this; and
Gerry, who had not yet said anything about his private fears,
learned that others in the camp also planned to rescue the American
girl under sentence at the _schloss_. The camp--which in six months
had not succeeded in getting one of their own number free--swore now
to save the prisoner of von Fallenbosch. Such was the spirit of the
_offizier-gefangenenlager_ of Villinstein.

So Gerry told O’Malley and Lownes about Ruth Alden; and together
they laid their plans. Two days later the Irishman grasped Gerry’s
arm tightly.

“We wait, bye, only for a moon.”

“You mean the bore’s finished?”

“As near as may be till the night of use. You’ve the almanac; when
will be the moon big enough to give you light to fly?”

“Fri--no, Thursday, Mike?”

“You’ll be certain, bye; you’ll not spoil all by impulsiveness.”

“Thursday will be all right, if it’s clear, Mike.”

“Then pray, bye, for a dark evening.”

“And a clear night!”

“Aye; a clear night--to find Mannheim!”

And Thursday evening came, overclouded, yet with a moon behind the
clouds which shone bright and clear for minutes at a time, then,
obscured, left all the land in blackness.

The digging parties of the last week had placed in the tunnel enough
food from the officers’ packages, which arrived regularly through
Switzerland, to supply three days’ rations for ten men; so that
night the ten descended into the tunnel. They recognized it was
possible that the guards knew about the tunnel and had permitted
them to enter it that night only to catch them at the other end. The
test would come when taps was sounded and the German officer of the
day, making his rounds of the barracks, would find ten men missing
roll call.

Gerry then was lying on his face in the tunnel and passing back dirt
which those in front of him excavated. Only by counting the drumming
of his heart could he estimate the minutes passing, but he knew that
the delay in the tunnel was longer than O’Malley had planned.

“Taps! Taps!” came the word from Lownes, at the prison end of the
burrow, who had heard the German bugle blow. From forward, where
O’Malley was digging, dirt kept coming back, and still more dirt.
For the diggers had not dared to run the bore to the surface, nor,
indeed, near enough to the surface so that a sentinel, treading
above, would break through. At best, therefore, O’Malley, who was
finishing the bore, had a fair amount left to do.

“The alarm! The alarm!”

Gerry, gasping in the stifling air of the burrow, could not hear the
bugle or the bells; the warning was passed to him by the man at his
heels; and Gerry passed the alarm on to the heels at his head. The
Germans knew now that men were missing; the camp guards were out,
the police dogs let loose; sentinels would fire, without challenge,
at anyone sighted outside of the barracks.

But from past the heels at Gerry’s head a fresh, cool current of air
was moving. He drew deep breaths, and as the heels crawled from him
he thrust upon his elbows and crept after. The bore was open;
O’Malley was out upon the ground. The heels ahead of Gerry altered
to a hand, which reached into the burrow, caught Gerry’s arm, and
dragged him out. Kneeling at the edge of the hole, he thrust his arm
down, caught someone, and pulled him out.

O’Malley was gone; the man whose hand had helped Gerry also had
vanished. Gerry made no attempt to find or follow them as he
crouched and ran; the plan was that all would scatter immediately.
Machine guns were going; searchlights were sweeping the ground.
Gerry fell flat when a beam swung at him, went over and caught some
other poor devil. A field piece upon a platform on the edge of the
camp opened upon the space a hundred yards beyond Gerry and shrapnel
began smashing.

One good thing about shrapnel Gerry recognized; it spread smoke
which screened the searchlight flares. Another feature was that it
and the machine-gun fire was as hard on the police dogs as upon the
fugitives. But that was like the Germans--when they were
surprised--to let go everything at once.

Gerry jumped up and fled, taking his chances with the machine-gun
bullets and with the shrapnel which burst all about at random; but
he watched the searchlights and threw himself down when they
threatened.

O’Malley had planned a surprise attack in force--if you can call ten
unarmed men a force when attacking a German flying field. But Gerry
knew that already the ten must be cut in two. Some of them probably
never got out of the tunnel; the machine guns or the shrapnel surely
must have accounted for one or two. He heard dogs give tongue as
they were taught to do when they had caught prisoners.

The Irishman’s plan, wild enough at best, had become hopeless. Gerry
had offered no other plan, because he had failed to form anything
less mad. But now as he lay on the ground, while a searchlight
streamed steadily above him, a plan offered itself.

This came from the clouds and from the moon shining through when, as
now, the clouds split and parted--from the moon whose rising and
shining full O’Malley and he had awaited. They had waited for the
moon to furnish them light for their night flight in a German
airplane after they got the machine. They had not thought of the
moon as bringing them a “ship.” But now, above the rattle of the
machine guns and between the smashings of the shrapnel, Gerry heard
motors in the air and he knew that night-flying Hun-birds were up.
For their pilots, too, had been waiting for the moon for practice.

It is all very well to talk about night flying in the dark; but
Gerry knew how difficult--almost impossible--is flight in actual
darkness. When he had been in training for night flying, years ago
at his French training field, he had waited so many weeks for the
moon that now he jeered at himself, lying flat under the searchlight
beam, for a fool not to have thought of German flyers being up
tonight.

They were up--six or eight of them at least. He could see their
signal lights when he could not hear their motors. They had come
overhead when the lights at the prison blazed out and the guns got
going. The machine guns and the shrapnel fire ceased; only the
searchlights glared out over the fields beyond the prison wire. The
moon went under the clouds again. Gerry knew he could dodge the
searchlights; but now he made no attempt whatever to flee. Instead,
he crept back toward the prison, and between the beams of lights,
which reached away to the south, almost parallel, and which swung
back and forth slightly.

Except for those lights, all was black now; and Gerry knew how those
searchlight beams must tempt some German cadet making his first
night flight under the clouds. Gerry had been a cadet flying at
night in the darkness with clouds closing overhead. He knew how
strange and terrifying was the blackness of the ground; how welcome
was any light giving view of a landing place. The airdrome, with its
true landing lights, was two miles to the south; but what was
direction, and what was a difference of two miles to a cadet coming
down through the clouds, and “feeling” in the darkness for the
ground? Gerry himself only a few months before, when caught by
closing clouds, had come down in a field six miles from the one he
sought. Indeed, French airmen flying at night had come down in
German airdromes by mistake, as Germans had come down in French.

So Gerry lay in the blackness between the searchlight beams,
accusing himself for dullness in not having known. If he had seen an
escape before, and seen these searchlights shooting out over the
fields, he might have realized how they imitated landing lights; but
he had not; and O’Malley--if he lived--would be waiting for him by
the flying field. No, not O’Malley. For the Irishman’s voice
whispered to him gently. O’Malley dragged himself up.

“Bye, you’re hit, too?”

“No; I’m all right. You?”

“’Twas bad planned, all.” The Irishman took blame upon himself for
the catastrophe which had befallen the others. “I doubt whether any
of them----”

His lips lay to Gerry’s ear; but Gerry turned his head.

“You can stand and fight a minute, O’Malley?”

“Arrah! You see them coming?”

“It’s overhead, O’Malley; listen. One of them’s trying to get down.
Maybe there’s two men in it.”

“What do you mean I should hear?”

“The silence,” Gerry said. “One of them just shut off above us.”

“I’m affecting you, bye,” said O’Malley. “But I know what you mean.”

The silence to which Gerry referred was only comparative; the motor
was shut off in the German airplane which was trying to “get down”;
but the rush of the volplane kept the airscrew thrashing audibly.
The sound passed a hundred yards overhead; it increased suddenly to
a roar as the pilot opened his throttle; and Gerry knew that in
volplaning down, the cadet had misjudged the ground and had switched
on his engine to give him power to circle about and try for the
landing again.

The roar returned; throttled down; the airscrew thrashed;
black-crossed wings darted through the beams of a searchlight; the
pilot got his wheels on the ground and his machine was bounding.
Gerry was on his feet and running after it. O’Malley followed. The
airplane rolled slowly through the second pencil of light and, as
the pilot stepped from his seat, Gerry charged him from behind.
Gerry tackled him and knocked him down; Gerry jerked out the
German’s automatic pistol.

“O’Malley?” Gerry challenged the figure which struggled up.

“Bye!”

“There was only one on board. I have him. Take his pistol
ammunition, his helmet, and goggles.”

“I have them, bye.”

“Get aboard--in the forward seat pit!”

Gerry backed to the machine himself, holding the German covered. The
prisoner dodged back and moved to wreck his machine. Gerry fired and
the German fell.

Gerry jumped into the pilot’s pit; the engine and the airscrew the
German had left just turning over; Gerry opened wide, and felt his
wheels rolling; an exultation of relief and triumph, rather than
definite sense, told him that he was flying. Little lights set over
dials before him informed of the accustomed details by strange
scales and meters--his speed, his height, his direction of flight,
and the revolutions his engine was making.

He gazed below at the ground lights from which he had risen; he
turned about. The machine which he had captured, like most training
machines, was big and heavy; its body could be arranged for two
seats or for one. O’Malley had found the other pit; and though the
machine had been balanced for pilot only, the trick of flying with
weight forward was easy for Gerry.

He switched on the light above the mapboard and found spread before
him a large detail map of the immediate vicinity. Below was a chart
of smaller scale for use in case the pilot “flew out” of the first
map and was lost. But Gerry was satisfied with the one already in
position. It gave him Mannheim and--he bent closer to see clearly
upon the vibrating surface--the grounds and wood von Fallenbosch and
also the speck of the _schloss_.

The feeling of boundless power, limitless recklessness to dare and
do, which flight had first brought to him as a cadet years before,
reclaimed him. Flight, that miraculous endowment, was his again. He
passed to O’Malley the German pilot’s hood; he protected his own
eyes with the goggles, and, watching the ground to estimate the wind
drift, he set his course by compass for Mannheim. What he was to do
there he did not know; and he no longer attempted to form any plan.
The event--inevitable and yet unforseeable--which had brought him
this ship had taught him tonight to cease to plan. He was flying,
and content to let fate guide him. Somehow--he had no idea at all of
how--but somehow this night he would find Ruth Alden and take her
with him. Destiny--the confidence in the guidance of fate which
comes to every soldier and, more than to any other, to the flying
fighter of the sky--set him secure and happy in the certainty of
this.

He had climbed above the clouds and was flying smoothly and serenely
in the silver moonlight. He was flying solitarily, too; for if alarm
had spread upon the ground to tell that escaped prisoners had taken
a German machine, it had not yet communicated itself to a pilot in
position to pursue. Behind him lay only the moonlight and the stars;
below, the sheen of cloud tops, unearthly, divine; the sheen split
and gaped in great chasms, through which the moonlight slanted down,
lighting great spots of darkness separated by the glinting path of
the Rhine. The river made his piloting simple; he had only to sight
it when the clouds cleared, and he must follow to Mannheim.

There was a machine gun set in the nacelle before O’Malley, and
Gerry saw the Irishman working with it. O’Malley pulled the trigger,
firing a few trial shots, and turned back to Gerry and grinned. The
noise of the motor and the airscrew prevented Gerry from
communicating any plan to his comrade, even if Gerry had one, but he
knew that, in whatever happened, he could count upon O’Malley’s
complete recklessness and instant wit.

Lights were below--most of them a bit back from the river. That
would be the city of Worms; a few more miles, and Gerry must decide
what he was going to do. But for the moment the sensation of freedom
and of flight together continued to intoxicate him. The Rhine
wavered away to the east, straightened south; ahead--far
ahead--lights. There was Mannheim.

But O’Malley, in the forward seat, had turned, and, with an arm,
pointed him forward and above. And far ahead, and higher, Gerry
spied dancing specks which caught the moonbeams--specks set in
regular order across the sky and advancing in formation. An air
squadron flying north!

Below it mighty crimson flashes leaped from the ground, and through
the clatter of his motor Gerry heard the detonation of tremendous,
thunderous charges. Now black spots of smoke floated before the
flying specks, and from the ground guns spat fiery into
action--German anti-aircraft guns replying to aerial torpedoes
dropped from the sky.

Others besides the officer prisoners of Villinstein and the German
cadets of the nearby airdrome had waited for the moon that night.
Allied pilots also had waited; and now, with the moon to favor and
guide them, they had come to attack the chemical works and the
munition factories of Mannheim! An allied air raid was on that
night!




CHAPTER XXI: THE RAID ON THE SCHLOSS


Gerry’s feet thrust on the rudder bar, swinging his machine to meet
them, while hot rills ran through his limbs, warming him against the
chill of the night flight above the clouds. He had thought of the
frontier as a hundred and fifty miles away--two hours’ flight at
best in this slow, heavy training “bus”--but here his friends were
bringing it to him. His excitement prevented him from realizing
instantly that to his friends he must appear an enemy--a
black-crossed Hun-bird flying to fight them.

A covey of German pursuit planes, flushed up from some airdrome near
the raided city, swooped upward in front of Gerry, climbing for the
advantage of altitude before starting their attack upon the raiders.
Gerry could see them clearly--triplane Fokkers mostly, of the
swiftest, best-climbing, and best-armed type. Some of them saw him,
but saw, too, that his machine was German. Probably the pilots
wondered what that old “bus” was doing there, but no one
investigated, while Gerry flew on.

The clouds had quite cleared below, but the city of Mannheim,
speckled with lights a few minutes before, lay dark except where the
great crimson bursts of the allied torpedoes erupted; where flames
fanned from roofs of burning buildings; where the scintillant points
of searchlights glared into the sky. Rockets streaked above the
black city; shells flared and flaked in the air; and the glory of
battle grasped Gerry. Grasped O’Malley, too. He patted his machine
gun and turned about in his seat, appealing to Gerry.

Above them the Fokkers and the other machines of the German defense
were diving and engaging the raiders; a light caught the under wings
of a plane and showed Gerry the tricolor circles of the allies.
Before it sparks streaked--the illuminated tracer bullets streaming
from the machine guns; and toward it, beyond it--now through
it--other sparks streaked back. These were the tracer bullets of the
German who was attacking; and Gerry, jerking back his elevator,
tried to climb; but the big, lumbering training “bus” responded only
slowly.

When he threw up the nose, bringing the forward machine gun to bear,
O’Malley loosed a burst of bullets, though the target German plane
was five hundred yards away. A range of that length was all right
for machine-gun work on the ground, but in the air--with firing gun
and with the target flying--it was sure waste. Gerry bent forward
and pummeled O’Malley’s back to tell him so. But the Irishman did
not turn; while Gerry climbed, the raiders and the Germans dropped,
bringing the battle nearer, and O’Malley had a target now at two
hundred yards from which he would not be withheld.

The range still shortened, and bullets streaked down past Gerry. He
gazed above and tried to dodge; O’Malley looked up; he saw the
tricolor circle and did not reply. One of their own people, having
sighted the black cross, was coming down upon them, taking them for
German. And at the same instant the far-off Fokker at which O’Malley
had been firing realized that there was something wrong about this
big, slow, black-crossed machine; the German swung upon it, his
machine guns going. Gerry’s engine went dead and he found himself
automatically guiding the “bus” in a volplane which he was keeping
as slow and as “flat” as possible as he glided below the battle and
sought upon the ground for a place to land.

He examined his altimeter and learned that he was still up four
thousand feet, and with the flat gliding angle of the wide-winged
training biplane, he knew that he had a radius of more than two
miles for the choice of his landing. The battle was still going on
above Mannheim, as the allied bombers had swung back. A machine
flashed into flame and started down, with its pilot evidently
controlling it at first; then too much of the wing fabric was
consumed and it dropped. Other machines, too, were leaving the
battle; some of them seemed to be Germans damaged and withdrawing;
others appeared to be all right--they had just spent their
ammunition, perhaps. One got on the tail of Gerry’s machine, looked
him over, and then dropped past him.

Gerry was gliding north and west of the city, making for wide, open
spaces shown on the map which he had been studying--the smooth
spaces of the fields of the Schloss von Fallenbosch. Five hundred
yards away through the moonlight, and at almost his same altitude,
he saw another machine gliding, as he was, with engine shut off; the
circle of their volplane swept them toward each other.

In the forward seat pit of the English machine--for Gerry steered
close enough not only to see the allied insignia but the distinctive
details of the British bombing plane--the man who had been bomber
and machine gunner was lying back with head dropped; and the pilot,
too, had been hit. He seemed to be half fainting, only spurring
himself up for a few seconds at a time to control his glide.

Gerry stood up as they glided side by side; he hoped that the
Englishman could make out his uniform in the moonlight. He knew it
was little likely that the other could hear his shout, yet he
yelled: “I’m American; follow me!” And dropping back to his seat,
Gerry set himself to selecting the best spot for his landing.
Whether or not the English pilot saw or heard, he followed Gerry
down. The clear moonlight displayed the ground bare and smooth; it
was hard to guess just when to cease dropping and, turning straight
into the wind, give your elevators that last little upturn which
would permit landing on your wheels and rolling; but he did it, and,
turning in his seat as the rolling slowed, he saw the English plane
bounding upon the field; it leaped, threatened to topple, but came
down on its wheels again. Gerry had his hand on O’Malley. Together
they leaped down and ran to where the English biplane had halted.

The English pilot had regained strength; he had succeeded even in
lifting the body of his bomber out of his machine; and, considering
himself captured, he hastened to remove the top of his fuel tank in
order to set fire to his ship. Gerry observed this and shouted:

“Don’t do that! We’re escaped prisoners! We’re Irish and American.
Don’t!”

His voice carried; and the English pilot delayed with his match. If
any German was near, he did not evidence his presence. If any of the
enemy flyers had noticed the descent of the English biplane,
probably they had seen the black-crossed machine following it down.
So Gerry and the English pilot stood undisturbed, estimating each
other in the moonlight. A machine-gun bullet had grazed the
Englishman’s head; but he was fast recovering from the shock. Gerry
adjusted a first-aid bandage to stay the blood.

“Your ship’s all right?” Gerry asked.

“Look at it.”

“Looks all right; and bombs!” Gerry cried out, discovering a pair of
bombs still hanging in the racks. “You came down with bombs on!”

“I was gone--part the time,” the Englishman explained. “Thought I’d
released ’em.”

Gerry was not finding fault. Bombs he had; and, to take the place of
the German training machine, here was a ship with engine undamaged,
and which could fly again, and quite capable--after its bombs were
used--of bearing three men and a girl. Wisely had Gerry determined
that night not to try to guide fate. Events unforeseeable again had
him in their grasp. He gazed half a mile away where the gray walls
of the _schloss_ shimmered in the moonlight.

“There’s a girl in there,” he said to the English pilot. “An
American girl we’re going to have out. Will you help us?”

“How?”

“Lay those last two eggs close to the castle,” Gerry motioned to the
pair of bombs in the rack. “That will drive ’em all to the cellars;
then keep circling above ’em, as if to lay more eggs to keep ’em
there. O’Malley and I’ll rush the castle.”

“You two alone?” the Englishman asked.

“Alone?” Gerry laughed. “Lay your eggs, old hawk! Lay your eggs; and
two’s a crowd for that castle tonight! The only danger’s getting
lost in the halls! But in case someone shows, lend us your
pistol--we have one. Then lay your eggs--close but not on; and keep
flying above ten minutes more!”

The occupants of the Schloss von Fallenbosch all had been aroused
many minutes earlier by the burst of the first bombs in the city.
The detonations, followed immediately by the alarm and by the sound
of the anti-aircraft guns replying, had sent the citizens of
Mannheim scurrying to their cellars. The allied raiders never
attacked intentionally the dwelling places of the city; their
objectives were solely the chemical and munition works; but the
German population--knowing how their own flyers bombed open cities
indiscriminately--always expected similar assaults upon themselves.
Moreover, they well knew the difficulties of identifying objectives
from high in the air and the greater difficulty of confining attack
to a limited area; then there were the machine-gun bullets from the
aerial battle and the bits of shrapnel showering back upon the city.

But the _schloss_ heretofore had been quite removed from attack; it
was far enough from the city to be in small danger from the falling
shells of the high angle guns. So Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch
and his aids, his wife and his servants, when roused merely went to
their windows and watched the sky curiously and without idea of
personal danger. If they thought at all about the prisoner confined
in the cell in the old wing of the _schloss_ it was to consider her
quite securely held; she, too, was roused, undoubtedly, and
listening to the sounds which told that pilots from the allied
forces were fighting within a mile or two. But what could she hope
from them?

Ruth, indeed, was aroused. This night was the first since she had
been taken, upon which the allies had attacked at Mannheim; but she
had recognized the distinctive sounds--distant but tremendous--which
told of a raid. Her window was open but for its bars, and its height
in the wall, instead of interfering, facilitated inspection of the
sky.

It gave her view over only a limited quadrilateral, of course, but
every few seconds something happened in that space--shells burst, or
a searchlight swept across, or a rocket flared--more than enough to
make her sure that a real attack was on. Once she had a glimpse of
an airplane upon which a searchlight glared and about which shrapnel
burst; that meant she had seen a French, or English, or an American
machine!

To her, who was about to die, the sight was enormously exciting. Not
that it brought her shadow of hope for herself. For the first five
days following her capture she had been kept shut up in her cell,
seeing only the man who brought her food and refused any right of
access to anyone else.

At the end of the five days she had been led before a military court
of three men--von Fallenbosch and two other officers--who accused,
tried, and sentenced her without permitting her any semblance of
defense; she was led back and locked up again awaiting the day for
the execution of the death penalty, which had been left to the
discretion or the whim of Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch.

Her end might come, therefore, upon any day, or upon any hour, and
without warning; it might not come for weeks or months; her
execution might not, indeed, occur at all. But a more terrible
suspense of sentence scarcely could be devised. Its purpose
ostensibly was to make her disclose facts which the Germans believed
that she knew. Of course they had held inquisition of her
immediately upon capture and several times since, but without
satisfactory result; so they kept her locked up. For reading matter
she was supplied with German newspapers.

These proclaimed with constantly increasing boastfulness the
complete triumph of the German arms. Everywhere the Germans had
attacked, the allies had crumpled, fleeing in disorder, leaving guns
by the hundred, prisoners by the tens of thousands. One more stroke
and all would be over! Prince Ruprecht would be on the channel; the
Crown Prince would be in Paris!

Ruth had seen German newspapers before and she had known of their
blatant distortions of truth, but she had never seen anything like
the vaunts of those days. These must have, she feared, much
foundation in fact. Visions of catastrophe to the British Fifth
Army, of the rout from the Hindenburg line almost to Amiens, and the
terrors of the retreat haunted her in her solitary days. Was it
possible that the English were completely crushed and that the
French were helpless? Possible that the American army, which now was
admitted to have arrived in some force, had proved so utterly unfit
for European warfare that the allies dared not send it into the
battle line?

The few words spoken to her by the man who attended her boasted that
such were the facts. She thought of that front from Soissons to
Reims, where the French lay unaware, perhaps, that upon them was
soon to come the final, overwhelming attack. It must be in the last
stages of preparation, with the hundreds of thousands of reserve
troops secretly concentrated by night marches; with the thousands of
guns and millions of shells secreted and in place for another such
surprise attack to be delivered in some amazing, unforeseen manner
as that assault which two months ago swept over the plains of
Picardy and broke the English line. Perhaps already the attack was
begun; perhaps----

Such terrors held her when she lay sleepless or only half drowsing
in the dark; they formed the background for more personal affrights
visualizing her own friends--Hubert and Milicent and Mrs. Mayhew,
French girls whom she had known, and many others. Most particularly
her terror dwelt upon Gerry Hull. She had ventured to inquire of the
Germans regarding his fate; at first they refused information, then
they told her he was dead, next that he was a prisoner; and they
even supplied her with a paragraph from one of their papers boasting
of the fact and making capital of his capture.

He was in one of their camps, to be treated by the Germans--how? Her
dismay would dwell with him; then, suddenly considering her own
fate, she would sit up, stark, and grasping tight to the sides of
her cot. Her mother and her sisters in Onarga--would they ever know?
Cynthia Gail’s people--what, at last, would they learn?

A sudden resounding shock, accompanied by a dull rolling sound,
vibrated through the air. A great gun was being tested somewhere
nearby, Ruth thought. No; they would not do that at night. Then it
was an explosion at the chemical works; something had gone wrong.
The shocks and the sounds increased. Also they drew nearer. Now
guns--small, staccato, barking guns--began firing; shells smashed
high in the air. Ruth had dragged her chair below her window and was
standing upon it. Ah! Now she could see the flashes and lights in
the sky; an air raid was on. There within sight--not a mile off--and
fighting, were allied machines! Transcendent exaltation intoxicated
her.

    The bombs bursting in air!

The stanza of the glorious song of her country sang in her soul with
full understanding of its great feeling. An American prisoner long
ago had written those wonderful words--written them, she remembered,
when lying a captive upon an enemy vessel and when fearing for the
fate of the fort manned by his people. But

    ... the rocket’s red glare,
    The bombs bursting in air,
    Gave proof through the night
    That our flag was still there.

The burst of these bombs and the flash of these rockets brought the
same leaping glory to Ruth. Not far away in France her flag yet flew
high; her people yet battled, and boldly, defiantly, if they could
send here over German soil such a squadron of the air to this
attack. The bombs and the guns and the rockets continued.

Sometimes they swept closer; but swiftly they retreated. Now the
motor clatter of a single airplane separated itself and became
louder than all the distant sound. This sound seemed to circle and
swoop over the _schloss_; and--Ruth swayed at the buffet of a
tremendous shock; she caught at the wall to steady herself; but the
wall, too, was quivering. A bomb had burst nearby; near enough,
indeed, to destroy some of the building, for through the tremors of
the detonation she heard the crash of falling walls, the yells and
screams of terror.

Ruth, steadying herself, realized that this attack might mean her
destruction; but defiant triumph filled her. The airplane which was
circling the _schloss_ was one of the allies; the booming clatter of
its motor as it returned was completing the panic throughout the
_schloss_. A new eruption vibrated the walls, blowing down stones,
timbers; the fury of its detonation battered her. The next might
bury her in the débris of these walls; but she sang--wildly,
tauntingly she sang _The Star-Spangled Banner_.

The taunt brought no protest. Throughout the _schloss_ now was
silence. She did not believe that all, or, indeed, many of the
occupants of the place had been killed. But she knew that all who
were alive were hiding in the cellars.

The increasing roar of the airplane motor as the machine swept back
on its orbit of return struck through her pangs of awe at the
possible imminence of her annihilation; but through them she sang,
and this time the motor roar rose to its loudest and diminished
without the shock of another bomb.

One had been dropped, perhaps, and had failed to explode, or the
pilot had found himself not quite in the position he had desired.
The diminuendo of his motor noise continued only for a few moments,
however; it altered to a crescendo, warning of the approach. But now
other sounds, closer and within the _schloss_, seized Ruth’s
attention.

Her name echoing in the stone halls--“Ruth! Ruth Alden! Where are
you?”

Was she mad? Was this a wild fantasy of her excitement, a result of
her long terror? Was this her failure to hold her reason at the
approach of fate? It seemed to be not merely her name, but Gerry’s
voice. She could not answer, but she could sing--sing _The
Star-Spangled Banner_----

    And the rocket’s red glare,
    The bombs bursting in air--

Her voice seemed to guide the voices without. “Ruth! Ruth Alden! Are
you all right? We’re here!”

“_Gave proof through the night_,” she sang, “_that the flag was
still there----_”

Now voices--unmistakable voices--answered her; and she cried out to
guide them. Gerry called to her, his voice wondrous with triumph and
joy. He was there at the door of her cell; another man was with him;
a friend. They were working together with a bar to burst the lock;
the friend laughed loudly and was not afraid. Gerry did not laugh;
he spoke to her again and again, asking about her. She was well? She
was unhurt?

[Illustration: Gerry was there at the door of her cell; another man
was with him; a friend]

Now they had the lock broken; the door open. Gerry seized her as she
came out; he kissed her; he picked her up and started to carry her,
while she cried to him that she was strong and could walk; could
run; could do anything now. Anything!

The roar of the airplane continued overhead; and Ruth now knew the
trick. It was keeping the Germans below while Gerry and his
companion went through the _schloss_. Ruth did not yet have complete
comprehension of the event; she supposed that Gerry must have
escaped from Germany long before; that he had rejoined his squadron
and had come from the allied lines with the raiders that night.

Now they were out of the _schloss_ and Gerry was leading her over
soft ground--a field brightly lit by the moon.

“Gerry, I’ve their plan!” Ruth cried to him. “On the front between
Soissons and Reims; their next attack! I know it....”

He no longer was leading her. He lifted her and bundled her against
him, quite as he had done once so long before. An airplane was
approaching; she could hear the loud crescendo of its motor;
suddenly it ceased and she heard only the whir of the airscrew of a
machine about to land.

Gerry was speaking to her, but for some reason she could not
understand what he was saying; she could hear his words, but they
were separate sort of words without meaning. He and Mike were
lifting her now and lowering her feet first into a pit--the seat pit
of an airplane. Mike stepped down into the pit with her and
supported her there. Gerry was gone from her now, but not far away.
He was in the pilot’s pit, or just behind it, with the pilot in
front of him. The motor was roaring again; the machine was moving;
it was rising. She was flying!

Far--far below, when she looked back, she saw a strange sheen, which
was the moonlight on the ground, with a twisting, brighter strip
dividing it.

“That,” she tried to say to the man holding her in his lap, “that’s
the Rhine?”

He tried very hard to hear her, and she supposed that the same thing
must be the matter with him as was the trouble with her when Gerry
spoke to her on the ground. Only slowly she realized that she could
not even hear her own voice for the noise of the motor.

She looked back to the other pit and saw Gerry’s face; he waved at
her and she waved back; then she sank upon the shoulder of the man
holding her, and she lost consciousness.

Many times while that English bombing biplane--weighted now by three
men and a girl instead of by two men and bombs--made the journey to
the allied lines, Ruth stirred to semi-wakefulness. The swaying and
the rising and the falling of the airplane as it rode the currents
of the air made it seem to Ruth that she was upon a ship at
sea--upon the _Ribot_. At other times the motion seemed merely the
buoyancy following the sinking of sensations in a dream. Afterwards
she remembered sitting up, wide-eyed and collected in mind, and
gazing down upon the moonlit ground; but at the time these occasions
gave no reaction.

She remembered that Gerry waved to her many times--every time she
turned. Complete consciousness returned to her, however, only when
she found herself no longer rising, and sinking, or swaying to right
and left, with all sound overwhelmed by motor noises. She was upon a
cot then; it was steady, and soft, and marvelously comfortable; and
extremely kind people were caring for her--one of them an American
girl.

Mrs. Mayhew was there, and George Byrne, and others, who identified
her. Also, of course, there was Gerry. It was he who introduced to
her two strange officers--one French and one American--and it was
Gerry who said: “These are officers of our intelligence division,
Ruth. Tell them what you can; then everyone will leave you alone to
rest. Your work will be done.”

So she told them, summoning all her strength to repeat everything
correctly and in detail; and when she had finished she answered
their questions for more than an hour. The next day again they
questioned her. The attack upon the Soissons-Reims front was not yet
begun, they told her. Did they believe her? she asked.

It was not the business of the intelligence officers to express
either belief or incredulity; their task was simply to ascertain
what she knew, or believed that she knew; to check her recital over
with discovered facts about her; to add her reports to the others,
both confirming and conflicting; and to pass the report on.

Ruth herself was passed on the next day and requisitioned by other
men. Then she was taken to Paris and was left, undisturbed by
further examinations, to rest in a bed in a little private room at
one of the hospitals. She could not quite determine, during those
first days that she was detained there, whether she was in fact
under a sort of observational arrest or whether the constant care
which she received was solely to promote the return of her strength.

For a semi-collapse had come--collapse of only physical powers. Her
mind was ceaselessly active--too active, the doctor told her.
Sometimes at night she could not sleep, but demanded that she be
allowed to rise, and dress, and go to the intelligence officers, or
have them come to her, so she could tell them her whole story again
in a way they must believe.

If she could only make them see how Adler had looked; if she could
make them hear how his voice had sounded when he had spoken of that
Soissons-Reims front, they would not doubt her at all. If she could
speak with Gerry Hull again, perhaps he could help make them believe
her. But Gerry Hull was with his squadron. Only women were about
Ruth now, and doctors, and wounded men. So, day after day, she was
kept in bed awaiting the attack which--as all the world knows--came
on the twenty-seventh of May and against the French on the front
from Soissons to Reims.

The day the great assault began Ruth demanded to get up, and--it
seemed until that day that someone must have doubted her--at last
she was permitted to do as she pleased. So she returned to the Rue
des Saints Pères and to her old rooms with Milicent; she wore again
the khaki uniform which she had worn in Picardy; and, after reading
the communiques that night, she applied for active duty as an
ambulance driver.

That day the Germans had swept the French, in one single rush, from
the Chemin des Dames; the enemy were over the Aisne. Back, back;
everywhere the French, as the British in Picardy, were driven back,
yielding guns by the hundred, prisoners by the tens of thousands.
The Boche were over the Vesle now; they had Fismes. God! Again they
were upon the Marne! Could nothing stop them? Still they were
rushing onward, a broken army before them.

Ruth was in Paris, where talk of a sort which she had never heard in
France before was upon everyone’s lips. France had given all and the
Germans yet advanced. Their guns hourly roared louder. Four years
ago, to be sure, their guns were heard as plainly in the Paris
streets; four years ago the German field gray had come even closer;
four years ago the government had abandoned Paris and prepared, even
though Paris were taken, to fight and fight. But that was four years
ago and the French army was young and unspent; Britain, then, had
barely begun to come in. France had gathered all her strength, and,
in her mighty hour at the Marne, had hurled back the enemy, “saving”
Paris!

What mockery was that memory this day! Here, after the four years
and the spending of French and British strength, the Germans were at
the gates again only more numerous and more confident than before.

Ruth stayed alone in her room during a lone afternoon writing to
Cynthia Gail’s father and mother a full confession of all that she
had done. Her whole enterprise, so hopefully taken up, had failed,
she said. She related what she had tried to do; indeed, in defense
of herself, she related how she had succeeded in entering Germany
and in learning something of the German plan for the great drive
which was now overwhelming the world; but she had failed to bring
back any proof which was required to convince the army that the
information she had gained was dependable. So she felt that she had
played Cynthia Gail’s part for no gain; she had no great achievement
to offer Cynthia’s parents in recompense for the wrong which she had
done them.

She sealed and posted this, and now, at last, wrote to her own
mother fully of what she had done. Again the despair of the day
seized her. She wandered the streets where men--men who had not been
in the fighting during the four years--were talking of the allies
taking up a new line south of Paris and holding on there somehow
until America was ready. But when such talk went about Ruth gazed at
the eyes of the French who had been through the years of battle; and
she knew that, if the Germans won now, the French could do no more.

Ever increasing streams of the wounded were flowing back into Paris;
and through the capital began spreading the confusion of catastrophe
nearby. The mighty emergency made demand upon the services of those
refused only a few hours earlier; and Ruth left Paris that night
upon the driving seat of a small ambulance. The next morning--it was
the first of June--she was close to the guns and upon a road where
was retreat.

Retreat? Well, two months ago in Picardy when the English had gone
back before the Germans, Ruth had heard such a concourse to the rear
called retreat; so she tried to call this retreat--this dazed,
unresisted departure of soldiers from before the enemy’s advance.
What made it worse, they were the French--the poilus whom she met.
The French! When the British had been broken in Picardy and fell
back, fighting so desperately, they had sacrificed themselves to
stay the enemy until the arrival of the French! When the French had
arrived the German advance was stopped; the French had been the
saviors! But here the French were going back; and the British could
not, in turn, come to save them.

These poilus did not expect it; they had ceased, indeed, to expect
anything. For the first time, as the poilus looked at her, she saw
the awfulness of hopelessness in their eyes. Four years they had
fought from Maubeuge to the Marne; to the Aisne; in the Champagne
they had attacked and gained; at Verdun they had stood alone; this
year at Kemmel they had sacrificed themselves and held on only to
meet at last, and in spite of all, the overwhelming disaster.

Ruth tried to cry a word or two of cheer when a man saw and saluted
her; but her cry choked in her throat. These men were spent; they
were fought out; beaten. And just behind them, at Château-Thierry,
whence they had fled, was the Prussian guard coming on with these
beaten men between them and Paris.

Ruth sat, half dizzy, half sick, at the wheel of the little car,
forcing it forward by these beaten men when the road offered a
chance. She was maneuvering toward a crossroad; and as she
approached it she noticed the French no longer trudging to the rear;
they were halted now; and as Ruth passed them and reached the direct
road to Château-Thierry she found them lined up beside the road,
waiting. Officers were clearing the way farther down; and as someone
halted Ruth’s car she stood up and stared along the rise of ground
to the south.

A sound was coming over, borne by the morning breeze--a sound of
singing in loud, confident, boasting notes. Three notes, they were,
three times repeated--the three notes which were blown on the bugles
in Berlin when the kaiser or princes of the royal house were coming;
three blatant, bragging notes which Ruth had learned a year before
to mean, “Over there!”

    For the Yanks are coming; the Yanks are coming,
    The drums rum-tumming everywhere....

Ruth caught to the side of the ambulance and held on tight. American
voices; thousands of them! American men; American soldiers singing!
Americans coming into this battle--coming forward into this battle,
singing! Swinging! She could see them now as they wound about the
hill--see the sun flashing on their bayonets, and the fine,
confident swing--the American swing--of their ranks as they
approached.

    The Yanks are coming; the Yanks are coming...
    And we won’t go back till it’s over, over here!

Ruth leaped up and screamed aloud with joy.

“What is it, Mademoiselle?” one of the dazed poilus inquired.

“The Americans are coming! Our men are here! Our Americans! _The
Yanks--the Yanks are coming!_” she shouted it in the rhythm of the
song.

What had seized her that day upon the _Ribot_ when she saw the
_Starke_ come up and Gerry told her it was American; what had
thrilled through her that night she arrived in France; what had
stirred throughout her that morning near Mirevaux when the English
officer called out to her, “Good old America,” and she watched the
English march off to die; what had come when the French at last
arrived before Amiens; even that ecstasy of the bombs bursting over
Mannheim when she had sung _The Star-Spangled Banner_ and Gerry Hull
had found her; all those together surged through her combined and
intensified a thousand-fold.

And this came not to her alone. It had come, too, to the French--the
French who had been falling back in flight--yes, in flight, one
could say it now--knowing that the Americans were behind them, but
expecting nothing of those Americans. Why they had expected nothing,
they did not know. At this moment it was incredible that--only the
instant before--they had been in total despair.

    The Yanks are coming; the Yanks are coming!

They were marines who were coming; they were so close that Ruth
could see their uniforms; American marines, who marched past her
singing--swinging--on their way to kill and to die! For they were
going to kill--and to die. They knew it; that was why they sang as
they did; that was why they were so sure--so boastfully, absolutely
sure!

    ... send the word; send the word to beware!

It was American; nothing else! No other men in the world could have
gone by so absolutely sure of themselves, singing--swinging--like
that. And oh, Ruth loved them! Her people; only a few, indeed, as
men were reckoned in this war; but such men! Still
singing--swinging--they swept by, drawing after them a vortex of the
French, who, a few moments before, had been abandoning the battle.
They were all past now, the Americans; oh, how few they had been to
face the German army with Paris and all the fate of France behind
them.

A few miles on--it could not have been farther--the Americans met
the Germans; and what they did there in the woods near the tiny town
of Meaux came to Ruth in wonderful fashion. The battle, which each
hour--each moment through that terrible morning--had been steadily
coming nearer and nearer; the battle ceased to approach. There was
no doubt about it! The fighting, furious twice over and then more
furious, simply could not get closer. Now the battle was going back!
The marines--the American marines, sent in to stop the gap and hold
the Paris road--had not merely delayed the Prussian advance; they
had halted it and turned it back!

That night Ruth learned a little of the miracle of the American
marines from one of the men who had fought. He had been brought
back, badly wounded, and for a time, while her ambulance was held
up, Ruth was able to administer to the man, and he talked to her.

“Three miles, we threw ’em back, Miss! Not much, three miles, but in
the right direction. They asked us to delay ’em. Delay ’em; hell ...
excuse me, Miss.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Ruth cried. “Oh, that’s fine! Say it
again--our way!”

“That’s all they asked us; to delay ’em. I was right near
Wise”--Wise was the lieutenant colonel--“when we got our orders. We
was to get in touch with the Germans and hold up their advance as
long as we could; and then retreat to a prepared position.

“‘Retreat?’ Wise yelled. ‘Retreat? Hell! We’ve just come!’ Well,
Miss, we got in touch! Oh, we got in touch, all right; touched ’em
with bayonets and butts. They couldn’t like it. Couldn’t quite
believe at first; didn’t think it was true; so we had to prove it to
’em, you see. Three miles back toward Berlin; not much; but--you
admit--in the right direction.”

“I admit it,” Ruth said; and--the boy was very badly hurt--she
kissed him before she climbed back to her seat.

The next day, when she at last allowed herself to rest, she wrote a
letter to Gerry. She had no idea where he was; so she addressed him
in care of his old squadron. She had no definite notion of their
present relations; what he had said, or what she herself had said,
during and following their flight back to France, she simply did not
know; for during that time she had dreamed extreme, incredible
things, which, nevertheless, fastened themselves upon her with such
reality that she could not now separate, with any certainty, the
false from the true.

That he had come for her, boldly, recklessly; that he and a
companion had succeeded in taking her from the _schloss_ and
bringing her back with them were facts which might be the foundation
of--anything between Gerry and herself or of no more than had
existed before.

Yet something--a good deal--had existed at the time they had parted
on the Rue des Saints-Pères before she went to Switzerland. That was
quite a lot to return to, and the only safe feeling to assume in him
was that which he had confessed to her there. So she wrote this day
chiefly of the marvel which she had seen--the miracle of the arrival
of the Americans, which, as the world already knew, had saved Paris.

She received reply from him after two weeks--a brief yet intimate
note, telling her that her wonderful letter had welcomed him just
ten minutes ago, when he had returned from a patrol. He had only a
minute now; but he must reply at once.

    I want to tell you, Ruth, that you have the right to feel
    that your work contributed to the arrival of our marines
    at the right moment, at the right place. You are familiar
    enough with war now to know that troop dispositions must
    be made far ahead. Your information was, of course, not
    the only warning to reach the general staff that the
    attack was to come where it did. But I am now permitted to
    tell you that your information was believed to be honest;
    therefore it had weight, and its weight was sufficient
    undoubtedly to make our command certain, a few hours
    earlier than they otherwise might have been certain, of
    the direction of the German attack; and, throughout the
    front, reserves were started to the threatened points a
    few hours sooner. Yours ever,
                                                      Gerry.

The day after Ruth received this the Germans started their attack of
the fifteenth of July; three days later the allied counter attack
was striking in full force and the armies of the German Crown Prince
were fighting for their lives against the French and Americans, to
get back out of the Marne “pocket.” Then, in the north, the English
struck and won their greatest victories. It was August; September,
and still, from Switzerland to the sea, the allies advanced; the
Germans went back. And still from across the sea, three hundred
thousand American soldiers arrived monthly.




CHAPTER XXII: “THE WAR’S OVER”


Ruth was working in a canteen with the American army now--or,
rather, with one of the American armies. Her particular army
occupied the bending front about the St. Mihiel salient, east of
Verdun. Gerry--she heard of him frequently, but from him only when
the chances of the mails brought letters along the lines of the
shifting armies--Gerry was doing combat flying again with the
American forces operating farthest to the west. She was close behind
an active battle front again, as by secret night marches the
American First Army with its tanks and artillery concentrated on the
south side of the salient from Aprémont to Pont-à-Mousson.

Ruth went about glowing with the glory of the gathering of the
fighting men of her people. Many times when she looked up at the
approach of a tall, alert figure in pilot’s uniform, her heart
halted with hope that Gerry had come among the flyers to aid in this
operation; then she heard, with final definiteness, that he was
still kept at his combat work farther west. The gathering of the
army, however, brought Hubert Lennon.

Ruth had not seen him since March; and his manner of reappearance
was characteristic. On the evening of the eleventh of September, the
sense of the impending had reached the climax which forewarned of
immediate events; and the troops who were to go “over the top” at
some near hour, and also the support divisions which were to follow,
were being kept close to their commands. The canteen where Ruth was
working was deserted long before the usual time, and Ruth was busy
putting away dishes when someone entered and coughed,
apologetically, to attract her attention. She glanced up to see a
spare young man in the uniform of an ambulance driver and wearing
thick spectacles. His face was in the shadow, with only his glasses
glinting light until he took off his cap and said:

“Hello, Miss Alden.”

Ruth dropped the dish she was holding. “Hubert! I didn’t know how
much I’ve needed to see you!” And she thrust both her hands across
the counter and seized his hand and squeezed it.

He flushed ruddy under his brown weather-beatenness, and she held
tighter to the hand he was timidly attempting to draw away--still
her shy, self-effacing Hubert. By hailing her by her own name, he
had informed her at once that he knew all about her; and he had not
assumed to replace his former familiar “Cynthia” with “Ruth.”

“You--no one’s needed me,” he denied, more abashed by the warmness
of his welcome.

“You frightened me about you at first, Hubert,” she scolded him,
“when you went away and--except for a couple of postcards--you never
sent me a word. Then I heard of you through other people----”

“Gerry?”

“Yes; Gerry or Mrs. Mayhew; and I found you were always all right.”

He winced, and she reproached herself for not remembering how
terribly sensitive he was about not being in the combat forces. “I
certainly never expected you’d worry about me.”

“But you’ve been wounded!” she cried, observing now as he shifted a
little that he moved as do those who have been hurt in the hip.
“Hubert, what was it and when?”

“Air raid; that’s all. Might have got it in Paris--or London.”

“Look at me; where and when?”

“Well, then, field hospital near Fismes early in August. I’m quite
all right now.”

Ruth’s eyes suddenly suffused. She had heard about that field
hospital and how the German flyers had bombed it again and again,
strewing death pitilessly, and how the attendants upon the wounded
had worked, reckless of themselves, in an inferno. “Hubert, you were
there?”

“That was nothing to where you’ve been, I reckon.”

“I’ve never thanked you,” Ruth replied, remembering, “for not
telling on me that time you caught me on the train from Bordeaux.”

“How’d you know I caught you then?”

Ruth told him. He looked down. “I was pretty sure on the _Ribot_
that you weren’t Cynthia, Miss Alden,” he said, “but I was
absolutely sure I wasn’t doing anything risky--to the country--in
keeping still. By the way, I’ve a letter from Cynthia’s people for
you.”

He reached into a pocket and Ruth studied him, wonderingly. “How
long have you been here, Hubert?”

“Oh, three or four days.”

“How long have you known where I was?”

He hesitated. “Why, almost all the time--except during the retreat
in March, and then when you were in Switzerland and in Germany--I’ve
known fairly well where you were.”

“Why didn’t you come to me four days ago?”

“Didn’t have this till today.” He produced a letter postmarked
Decatur, Illinois, and in the familiar handwriting of Cynthia Gail’s
father. “You see, after Gerry brought you back and everything was
out, I thought the only right thing--to you, Miss Alden, as well as
to them--was to write Cynthia’s people. I knew you would, of course,
but I thought you wouldn’t say, about yourself, what you should. So
I did it. Here’s what they say.”

He handed the letter to her, and Ruth withdrew nearer a lamp to read
it. They were still quite alone in the corner of the canteen, and as
Ruth read the letter written by the father of the girl whose part
she had played, tears of gratitude and joy blinded her--gratitude
not alone to the noble-hearted man and woman in Decatur, but quite
as much to the friend who had written of her to them with such
understanding as to make possible this letter.

She came back to him with tears running down her cheeks and she
seized his hand again. “Oh, Hubert, thank you; thank you! I don’t
think anything ever made me so happy in all my life.”

“You know Byrne’s dead, do you?”

“No! Is he? He died from that----”

“Not from that, Miss Alden. He completely recovered. He was killed
cleanly leading his platoon in the fighting on the Vesle. He had
written Cynthia’s people about you forgiving you, you see.”

Hubert turned to the door and opened it and gazed out through the
dark about the hills and woods where that night the hundreds of
thousands of Americans of the First Army lay. “Funny about us being
back here, isn’t it?” he said, with the reflective philosophy which
he was likely to employ when dismissing one subject. “I’ve been
thinking about it a lot these last days, seeing our fellows
everywhere--so awful many of them. Everyone of ’em--or their
fathers--came from this side first of all because they didn’t like
the way things were going in Europe, and they wanted to get away
from it. But they couldn’t get away from it by just leaving it. They
had to come back after all to settle the trouble. That’s an
interesting idea, when you think of it, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Ruth. “Hubert----”

“How does Gerry feel about being an American now?”

“I’ve not talked with Gerry for more than three months.”

“Being an American,” Hubert mused, “being an American is some
privilege these days--even if you only drive an ambulance. To be
Gerry Hull now!” He gazed at Ruth, who looked away, but who could
not stop color suffusing her face under his challenge. He glanced
about the room and observed that they were quite alone.

“I’ve wondered a good bit recently, Miss Alden,” he said in a queer,
repressed matter-of-fact way, “whether you might prefer--or might
not prefer--to have me tell you that I love you. You must know it,
of course; and since it’s a fact, sometimes it seemed that we might
be better friends hereafter if I just told you that fact. You know
I’ve not any silly idea that you could care for me. No; don’t
please!” he stopped her, when she attempted to speak. “We’ll not
arrive anywhere except by sticking to facts; we’re friends; may we
ever be!”

“O, we will be, Hubert!”

“Then it is better that I’ve told you I love you.”

“But you mustn’t!”

“I can’t control that, Miss Alden.”

“Mayn’t I be Ruth even now?”

“Ruth, then; yes, I like that. Good night, Ruth.”

“You must go? But tomorrow you’ll----”

“Tomorrow no one knows where any one’ll be. But it’s been great to
see you again.”

“And you, Hubert! Good night; good luck, and--thank you again a
thousand times.”

He went; and on the morrow, as everyone knows, the American First
Army went “over the top,” and at night the St. Mihiel salient, which
had stuck like a Titanic thorn in the flank of France for four
years, was wiped out; the American guns in the next days engaged the
guns of the outer fortresses of Metz.

In the stream of casualties, which was the American cost of the
victory, Hubert was swept to the rear. Ruth read his name cited in
the orders of a certain day for extraordinary coolness and devotion
in caring for the wounded under fire. He himself was wounded again
severely, and Ruth tried to visit him at the hospital to which he
was sent; but she was able only to learn that he was convalescing
and had been transferred to the south of France.

She read, a little later, another familiar name--Sam Hilton. There
might be other Sam Hiltons in the army; on the other hand, she was
familiar enough with the swiftness with which the draft had cleared
out Class I in America, to be certain that the Sam Hilton for whom
she had worked in January must now be somewhere in the American
army, and the particular Sam Hilton who was mentioned was a corporal
in an Illinois regiment which had been most heavily engaged in the
desperate fighting in the forest of the Argonne. He was
awarded--Ruth read--the military medal for extraordinary bravery
under fire and for display of daring and initiative which enabled
him to keep together a small command after the officers were killed
and finally to outwit and capture a superior German force.

Somehow it sounded like Sam Hilton to Ruth. “He got in the army and
got interested; that’s all,” she said to herself as she reread the
details. “He wouldn’t let anyone bluff him; and--yes, that sounds
just like Sam Hilton after he got interested.”

This was late in the fall; the Argonne then was cleared; and by a
shift of the divisions who were pressing constantly after the
retreating Germans, Ruth found herself in the last week of October
attached to the American units fighting their way to Sedan.
Infantrymen of the Illinois regiment, which possessed the decorated
Sam Hilton, came into the canteen and Ruth asked about him. Everyone
seemed to know him. Yes, he came from Chicago, and had been in the
real estate business; he was in a battalion which recently had been
heavily engaged again, but now was in reserve and resting nearby.

Ruth visited, upon the next afternoon, the little, just recaptured
French village about which the battalion was billeted; and right on
the main street she met--medal and all--Sam Hilton. He was seated
before a cottage and was very popular with and intent upon the
villagers gathered about; so Ruth had a good look at him before he
observed her. In his trim uniform and new chevrons--he was sergeant
now--he never looked “classier” in his life.

He appeared to have appointed himself a committee of one to
investigate the experiences of the inhabitants of that village
during the four years of German occupation, and he had found an
interpreter--a French boy of thirteen or fourteen--who was putting
into rather precarious English the excited recitals of the peasants.

Ruth approached when one series of translation was coming to an end,
and Sergeant Sam Hilton looked up and recognized her. “Why, hello;
you here, too, Miss Alden?”

He had been long enough in France so that he was not really much
amazed to encounter anyone. “Come here and listen to what the Huns
been doing to these people, Miss Alden,” he invited her, after she
had replied to his greeting. “Say, do you know that’s the way they
been acting for four years? We’re a fine bunch, I should say,
letting that sort of stuff go on for three years and over before we
stepped in. What was the matter with our government, anyway--not
letting us know. I tell you----”

It took him many minutes to express properly his indignation at the
tardiness of the American declaration of war. Yet certain features
of the situation enormously perplexed him.

“What gets my goat,” he confessed, “is how we’re so blamed popular,
Miss Alden. We Americans are well liked--awful well liked, ain’t
we?”

“We certainly are,” Ruth agreed.

“We’re liked not just as well as the English, far as I can see, but
better. Yes, better. That certainly gets my goat; out of it three
years; in it, one; and not really in it all of one yet; and
we’re--_top hole_. That’s a British expression, Miss Alden; means
absolutely _it_.”

“Yes,” said Ruth; “I’ve heard it.”

“Well, we’re that; _top hole_. How does it happen? What’ve we done
that others ain’t that makes them feel so about Americans over
here?”

Ruth could not answer. She could only accept, at last, an invitation
to lunch with him the first time they met again in any city where
they had restaurants.

The perplexity which Sam Hilton felt was being shared by many and
many another American in those days which swiftly were sweeping
toward the end of the war; and not least among the perplexed was
Gerry Hull.

That strange morning had arrived upon which battle was to be entered
against the Germans, as usual, and to be continued until eleven
o’clock; after eleven was to be truce. Gerry was on patrol that
morning, flying a single-seater Spad in a formation which hovered
high in the morning sky to protect the photographic machines and the
fire-control airplanes which were going about their business as
usual over the German lines, taking pictures of the ground, and, by
wireless, guiding the fire of the American guns.

The American guns were going it, loud and fast, and the German guns
were replying; they might halt at eleven, but no love was being lost
upon this last day.

About the middle of the morning German combat planes appeared. Gerry
was among the first to sight them and dash forward. Seven or eight
American machines followed him; and for the swift seconds of the
first attack they kept somewhat to formation. Then all line was lost
in a diving, tumbling, looping, climbing, side-slipping maelstrom of
machines fighting three miles above the ground. Each pilot selected
a particular antagonist, and Gerry found himself circling out of the
mêlée while he maneuvered for position with a new triplane Fokker,
whose pilot appeared to have taken deep dislike for him.

The German was a good flyer--an old hand in a new machine, Gerry
thought. At any rate, Gerry could obtain neither the position
directly above him or just behind him--“on the tail.” They fired at
each other several times passing, but that was no way to hit
anything. Several times, of course, they got widely separated--once
for an interval long enough to give Gerry chance to aid another
American who was being pressed by two Germans, and to send one of
the Germans down out of control. Then Gerry’s particular enemy
appeared and they were at it again.

Gerry climbed better now and got above him; Gerry dived, and the
German, waiting just the right time, side-slipped and tumbled out
from underneath. Gerry checked his dive and got about behind him.
Gerry was coming upon him fast, behind, and just a trifle below--in
almost perfect firing position--when he saw the German look back and
hold up his hand. Gerry held his fire, and, coming up closer, he saw
the German jerk his hooded head and point groundward. Gerry gazed
down upon a stark and silent land.

The spots of shells were gone. Where they had erupted and flung up
great billows of sand, and where their smoke had puffed and floated,
the surface lay bland and yellow under the morning sun. Truce had
come--truce which the German pilot in the Fokker alongside
signalized by wave of his hand. Gerry raised his hands from his gun
lanyard, and, a little dazedly, waved back, and he let the German
steer away. Gerry swung his own ship about, and, flying low over an
anomalous land of man-specks walking all about in the open, he shut
off his motor and came down in his airdrome.

Silence--except for voices and motor noises--silence! And nothing
particular to do or to expect; nothing immediately threatening you;
death no longer probable. Truce!

Gerry joined the celebrants; but soon he retreated to the refuge of
his quarters, where he was alone. It was rather confounding suddenly
to find yourself with the right to expect to live. To live! What
amazing impatience this morning aroused. He had leave to depart in
two hours to spend a week wherever he pleased; and while the minutes
dallied and dragged, he reread the last letter he had received from
Ruth, which had arrived four days ago. She had mentioned that she
expected to be sent to Paris, so Gerry found place upon the Paris
train; and, upon arriving in the city, he took a taxi to the Rue des
Saints Pères.

The little French girl, who opened the door of the familiar
_pension_, said, yes, Mademoiselle Alden was in Paris and, also, at
that moment actually in her room. Gerry entered the parlor and sat
down; but he could not remain still while he waited. He arose and
went about staring vacantly at the pictures upon the walls, seeing
no one of them, but hearing every slightest sound in the house which
might mean that Mademoiselle Alden was coming downstairs. He heard
light footfalls upon the floor above, which, he decided, were hers
as she moved about, dressing; and he wondered what dress she was
putting on--the pretty yellow dress which she had worn at Mrs.
Corliss’ or the uniform she had worn upon the retreat from Mirevaux.
He liked her in both; he didn’t care which she wore, if she would
only come.

He heard her step on the stair; he started to the door, impulsively.
But the little French girl might be about; so he drew back to the
center of the room and stood there until Ruth appeared. Then his
arms went out to her and, regardless of who might hear, he rushed to
her, calling her name.

She was small and slender and round and with her face almost white
from some absurd uncertainty about him and with her eyes wide. She
wore neither the beautiful yellow gown nor the uniform but a simple
blue dress of the sort which girls wear in the morning when they go
out, or in the afternoon, but which they do not put on particularly
for an evening call. Gerry was not critical; he thought the dress
mightily became her; but it made her bewilderingly demure.

“What is it, Ruth? You’re not glad I came right to you?”

“Glad! Oh, Gerry, my soul’s been singing since I heard your voice
down here and I knew that you’d come and you’re safe; and the war’s
over!”

He had her in his arms, her slight, vibrant figure close to him, her
eyes turned up to his. Gently--gently as upon that time when she
disengaged his fingers from his clasp of her shoulders--she raised
her hands and put them upon his breast and thrust him back. The
touch of her hands and the tenderness of her strength sent rills of
delight racing through him, but he did not understand them.

“Ruth, I love you; can’t you love me?”

“Love you!” Her eyes closed for a moment as though she no longer
dared to look at him. Her resistance to him had relaxed; now she
thrust back from him again; but he did not permit it. He overpowered
her, drawing her against him. So she opened her eyes.

“The war’s over, Gerry.”

“Thank God, Ruth!... I couldn’t let myself even dream of this
before, dearest.”

“You mustn’t say that!”

“Why not?”

“We’ll all be going back soon, Gerry--those of us who’ve lived--back
to what we’ve been before. That’s why I kept you waiting so long. I
had to change to this.” She looked down at her dress and he released
her a little to glance down also, wonderingly.

“Why? What about it, dear?”

“It’s my own--the only thing of mine you’ve ever seen me in; I used
to wear this at the office where I worked. You know, I told you.”

“I wondered why I loved you more than ever before, Ruth. Oh, silly
sweetheart! You think you’re going back to an office!” He laughed,
delightedly.

“No; we must think the truth, Gerry. We’ve been moving in madness
through the war, my love!”

“Ah! You’ve said that!”

“I didn’t mean it! We mustn’t imagine that everything’s to be
changed for us just because we’ve met in war and----”

“And you’ve saved me, Ruth!”

“You saved me, too!”

“Oh, we shan’t argue that, dear. But about not being changed--well
I’m changed incurably and forever, my love. I mean that! You’ve done
most of the changing too. Did you think you’d made me an American
only for duration of the war?”

“But Gerry, we must think. You’ll go home and have all your
grandfather’s buildings and money and----”

“You’ll have all, too, and me besides, dear--if you want me? Do you
suppose that all these months I haven’t been thinking, too? Do you
suppose I’d want you for a wife only in war? I want you, Ruth--and
I’ll need you even more, I think, to help me in the peace to come.
But that’s not why I’m here. I want you--you--now and forever! Can I
have you?”

“You have me,” Ruth said. “And I--I have you!”



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUTH OF THE U. S. A. ***


    

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